Arrived wearing a grass skirt and coconutsLeft in full body cast
Filed by Fin Keegan
The following letter appeared a fortnight ago in the pages of an American national news magazine which, for obvious reasons, we need not mention by name.
Dear Sir
Many thanks for your recent feature article on the economic boom we have been experiencing in Ireland. A few small corrections: Ireland is situated in the Atlantic Ocean, not the Pacific, as your reporter more than once maintains. Our weather, clothing and customs therefore are not as surprising once this is understood, though I can understand why much of the article's comic effect would be thereby lost. A consultation of any Atlas, reputable or otherwise, would have saved your man much trouble, not to mention the unfortunate 'flu and subsequent hospitalization he suffered as a result of mistaking drizzle for "heat-waves".
I am sure it has also come to light that Ireland has not been enjoying "an influx of other races to such an extent that pale-faced people seem to have become the norm".
It was also unwise, in this writer's opinion, for your reporter to express amazement at the existence in Ireland of telephones, electricity, books, and modern clothing to young men gathered at a sporting event. Of course such cultural confusion can easily arise in the minds of one whose sole preparation for an excursion to the country was the journalism of one Frank McCourt. It should be borne in mind that Mr McCourt, to go by circumstantial evidence alone, scrawls his semi-coherent, factually false, romantically supersaturated, and sentimentally odious journalistic drivel in a bid to stave off the feeling that he is incapable of a single fruitful act of imagination.
In closing I would like to take this opportunity to wish your reporter well on future assignments and a speedy recovery from his injuries. As was pointed out to him by the authorities which deported him he might be wise to leave a decent interval (forty years?) before returning to our shores.
Sincerely yours,
Frank Tort
The Old House
Killarney.
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