Poison Pens - Irish media nonsense exposed

Obviously every single day you can pick up an Irish newspaper, any of them really, and roll your eyes in horror at the errors, misspellings, pretensions, outrageous opinion masquerading as objectivity, and blatant spin.

So I'm going to reserve this occasional series for serial offenders and major errors of fact.

In the first category is long-time frustrated poet, Irish Independent sports writer Vincent Hogan, whose airbrushed, outdated 'matinee idol' byline picture is only matched by his fondness for prose more purple than a crate of Ribena.

Maybe you were busy Wednesday night, and didn't catch the Ireland V Brazil game? Thought you'd pick up the Indo on Thursday and read all about it? Vince has other plans for you.

From the casual racism of the opening line - 'It was settled by the deftness of a street thief" - you knew this was going to be vintage Hogan balls.

There's the one word sentences, the irrelevant multi-paragraph digressions, and the errors of fact that make you think he wasn't at the game at all. (On this occasion, the suggestion that the Brazilians were singing Ole. Ole is a Spanish word, associated in South America with Brazil's bitter rivals Argentina. It was the Irish fans chanting Ole, Vince.)

Receiving my inaugural 'Liam Lawler's Hooker' award for getting their facts completely wrong in an Irish newspaper is inevitably the Daily Mail, who've never enjoyed the closest relationship with factuality.

In a heavily topspun and overwritten article about the British Embassy employment dispute (with inevitable tired references to Ferrero Rocher and ironing newspapers), the offending scribe Lucie van den Berg manages a whopping error in her opening paragraph. See if you can spot it:

"It had all the appearances of the final days of the Raj. The last bastion of the Perfidious Albion's Imperialism in Ireland - or the British Embassy as we now call it - was the site of outrage among what Edmund Burke called 'the swinish multitude' yesterday."

It's got everything, hasn't it? The ridiculous analogy with the Raj is a nice starter, followed by a main course of ungrammatical factual error. Last bastion of English imperialism in Ireland? Erm, try 70 miles north of Dublin, love. And for desert, a sickly sweet pointless quotation culled no doubt from www.findmeaquotetomakemesoundsmart.com.

The story itself, you ask? There isn't one, really. Some people at the British Embassy were laid off, and their mates took a two hour picket action in sympathy.

Congrats to Vincent and Lucie, penning Irish media drivel at its finest.

Daily Mail

For the media savvy reader who has everything - here's the Daily Mail-o-matic! Why bother reading the Daily Mail when instead the Daily Mail-o-matic can auto-generate a plausible and convincing Daily Mail headline for any occasion?

As you can see to the side, the Daily Mail has been responsible for outrageous headlines for a long, long time.

My favourite so far - Will the French impregnate Britain's Swans?

Well, will they????