Who knew that our Tánaiste was a legend in his own lunchbox?

THE ‘school run’ in our house is a tightly-tuned military operation. There can be no time lost at any stage from when the ‘time to get up’ klaxon rings to ‘lads, the front door is closing!’ At this point, my son is usually sliding out the gap, grabbing his bike helmet from inside with seconds to spare, like something from the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles.

One moment of lost synchronicity kills the whole flow. We are as agile and elegant as the Leinster rugby backline on good mornings, passing schoolbags to each other, brushing three sets of teeth with two hands, but on bad mornings we are running around like headless chickens, or as I like to commonly refer to them, ‘Cork footballers’.

One of the key strategies to a successful morning exit is to have the lunches prepared the night before. And my wife is a tactical genius in this regard, always 12 hours ahead, carefully packing salmon paté sandwiches, cucumber sticks, olives and various other foodstuffs I didn’t even hear of until I was well into my 20s.

Basically, my children eat like 18th-century Italian princes.  And it seems when it comes to preparation, Tánaiste Leo Varadkar is of the same persuasion.

This week, Leo shared an image to his 199,000 followers on Instagram showing a fridge packed with lunches for the week ahead, a show of organisation more frightening than anything we saw during Putin’s Freedom Day processions on Monday. 

On the one hand, I’m extremely impressed Leo’s got lunches prepared for the whole week ahead, even if he probably got a bit of, ahem, help doing it. There’s a man who’s down with the plain people of Ireland, even if Kylemore cheese isn’t exactly a daily staple.

On the other hand, it does beg the question – if all the lunches are ready, and you’ve got someone to drive you to work, what’s the point in getting up early in the morning in the first place? 

Right time to deploy Bono

HOW do you fight back against the grim spectre that is throwing its dark shadow across the continent of Europe at the moment? How do you combat the evils of a nuclear power, led by a psychopathic tyrant, without sparking World War III? 

Send in Bono is the answer, of course.

Yep, this week, Nato surprised everyone when they deployed U2 for the first time in many decades. As we all know, Lockheed Corporation originally proposed U2 as an aircraft in 1953, with its first test flight in 1955, but the famous Irish variant consists of four northside lads – a rock ‘n’ roll juggernaut fashioned from hard experience on the streets of Ballymun. Or so the legend goes.

U2, as we all know, is capable of unleashing lethal levels of earnestness, has a keen sense of social justice, and has made some monumentally poor fashion decisions over the years.

Although, it is said the geolocation and navigation systems are rudimentary. Allegedly, you can travel around in the thing for days and you still can’t find what you’re looking for.

Anyway, in this information war, military chiefs believed the time was right to bring U2 out of retirement, and so the two primary components of the U2, namely Bono and Edge, were dusted down and made viable again.

Presumably, this operation was performed in a cave deep under Killiney Hill, and they were fired off in the general direction of Kyiv where they were tasked with invading Ukrainian hearts and minds, for one night only.

It is presumed Larry Mullen and Adam Clayton have been kept in reserve for further deployment in Yemen.

Markedly, It was U2’s first significant incursion into novel terrain since they invaded everybody’s iPhones back in 2014.

If you think the Ukrainians are noble defenders, try removing some U2 songs from your iPhone 6 circa 2014.

It took one reporter six years to successfully remove their album Songs of Innocence. The Russian army certainly won’t hold out that long.

The mission was, all in all, successful.

Of course, there were the usual detractors, chief amongst them the notorious Jackeens whose frequent refrain ‘Bono is a pox’ rang around the banks of the Liffey. They are never happy.

The Ukrainians, of course, were delighted. The duo played to a small crowd of fans, including members of Ukraine’s armed forces, clad in fatigues.

‘The people in Ukraine are not just fighting for your own freedom, you are fighting for all of us who love freedom,’ said Bono.

And so say all of us.

Don’t mention the 2002 war

IN this year of civil war centenaries, and with an apparent sea-change occurring in Northern Irish politics, it would be remiss of me not to mention another massive milestone in the life of the island of Ireland.

Yes, last week marked the 20th anniversary of the Saipan incident. Of course, this was a hugely difficult time for us all.

Brother turned against brother. Father against son. Dunphy turned against Gilesy. Gilesy turned against Bill. A sad and fractious time for us all and an exhausting time for Roy Keane’s late dog Triggs, who was pure wrecked from walking the roads. And so, let us all raise a glass in memory of those sad days – let bygones be bygones, let us heal our old wounds with friendship and utter those timeless words of national unity – ‘Okey doke!’