Captain Ireland and the Clones of Maggie Thatcher

"I was born in a Dublin street,

where the Royal drums did beat,

the loving English feet, they walked all over us,

and every single night,

when me da' would come home tight,

he'd invite the neighbours out with this chorus:

Come out ye' black and tans!

Come out and fight me like a man!

Show your wife how you won medals down in Flanders!

Tell her how the IRA,

made you run like hell away,

from the green and lovely lanes of Killeshandra!"

You’re belting out another verse of Come Out, Ye Black and Tans in your restaurant, the newspaper spread open in front of you. The headlines are glorious: England’s crumbling again, that bloated, sugar-addled eejit they’ve got as prime minister is making a right hash of things, and Sinn Féin’s now the biggest party in the occupied Six Counties. Every day, the dream of a united Ireland inches closer.

You’re just considering whether to march next door and start another brawl with that unionist bottom-feeder who runs the chipper when, knock knock knock, someone’s rapping on your window.

Your hand flies to your trusty little Armalite. Could be another sneaky SAS **** attempt.

"Who in the name of the Great Parnell is it?" you bark.

"It’s me, ya old rebel!" comes the familiar voice.

You lower the rifle. It’s Seamus McCarBomb, your old comrade from the Troubles, a man wanted for so many car bombings, the Brits lost count.

"Seamus, me boy! What brings ye out at this hour? Come for a pint or a pie?" you ask, eyeing the door.

"Neither, Eugene," Seamus says, stepping inside with the urgency of a man who’s just seen the devil herself. "The English are up to no good again!"

"Aren’t they always?" you scoff. "Let me guess, another plot to keep old Erin’s isle under their boot?"

"Worse," Seamus says, his face grim. "That weasel Keir Starmer’s gone and made a thousand clones of Maggie Thatcher in some secret lab!"

You nearly **** on your own spit. "A thousand Maggie Thatchers?!" You cross yourself instinctively. "One of her nearly destroyed the world! A thousand? That’s not your usual British plot, that’s the bloody Apocalypse!"

"Aye," Seamus nods. "And if we don’t stop ‘em, they’ll be swarming over Ireland like locusts at a free pint night."

You shudder as you imagine a thousand screaming Maggie Thatchers invading Ireland like a swarm of anchovies, poisoning your water supply, burning your crops, and delivering plagues onto your houses. You slam your fist on the counter. "Right. Where’s this lab?"

Seamus hands you a crumpled map. "Good luck, Eugene. Godspeed, Captain Ireland!"

You grab your beret, adjust your balaclava, and mutter, "If I die, tell that sweet freckled redhead over at the pub, I died fighting the Brits. And if I live… well, I will tell her what I got to say myself." Then you’re out the door, ready to turn a thousand Maggie Thatchers into a thousand piles of ash. "For Ireland!"