PERHAPS it happened when they were sleeping. Under cover of darkness, some hobgoblin with a sharp knife and a light touch may have removed their sense of irony, stitched them up and exited stage left.
 
From whom was the sense of irony removed? Two parties – HRH Queen Elizabeth II and Mrs Arlene Foster. It may not have been the same hobgoblin that did both surgical removals, but removal was certainly done.
 
Take QE2. Annually, she earns just short of £70 million. Her personal fortune is reckoned to stand at £350 million. She has six different homes – Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle, Holyrood Palace, Balmoral Castle, Sandringham Estate and Hillsborough Castle. This while the UK is estimated to have 280,000 homeless people.
 

In a recent comment on the Covid vaccine, Queen Elizabeth II said she got it, it didn’t hurt at all, and she would urge everybody “to think about other people rather than themselves.”

The British government sold £14 billion worth of arms in 2018. The Department for International Trade (DIT) said that makes the UK the world’s second largest arms exporter, after the US. On building its nuclear arsenal, the UK spent £18.7 billion.

Eh? She’s got £70 million a year, she’s got £350 million in personal wealth, she’s got six palatial homes, there are 280,000 people in her United Kingdom without a roof over their head – and she calls on her subjects to think about the welfare of other people, not just of themselves.
 
I think it’s safe to say this woman’s sense of irony has been permanently pinched, if she ever had one.
 
And Arlene Foster? Let’s pass lightly over Arlene and the RHI scandal (remember it?) and check out the First Minister’s more recent actions and words.
 
A week or so back, she met with the Loyalist Communities Council (LCC) which is a legal body that represents three illegal paramilitary: the UVF, the UDA and the Red Hand Commando.

The deputy leader of the Alliance Party, Stephen Farry,  said that  “Meetings like this...  give the impression that paramilitary organisations are legitimate stakeholders.”
But Mrs Foster, the First Minister, disagrees.
 
“I was very pleased to meet with the LCC today and to hear their concerns from their own community, to listen to those concerns, shared concerns about the Protocol, about the status of the United Kingdom, about the Belfast Agreement. So those conversations will continue.”
 
No sack-cloth and ashes there. In fact,  Mrs Foster sees nothing negative about the First Minister of this stateen meeting with people who are acting illegally by being members of three proscribed organisations. And not just a one-off chin-wag. She’s going to keep meeting these people and will, it appears, see it as part of her duty as a unionist leader.
Somewhere in the Fermanagh darkness, a hobgoblin has been at work in the Foster household.
 
It would be wrong, of course, to confine the absence of irony diagnosis to just these two women.  If you look, it’s everywhere. The US government has the biggest stock of nuclear weapons in the world, yet it condemns the violence of Iran and its attempts to build... yep, nuclear weapons. The last great hope of democracy, the shining city on the hill, is on its way to spending $1.2 trillion on its nuclear arsenal.
 
The British government sold £14 billion worth of arms in 2018. The Department for International Trade (DIT) said that makes the UK the world’s second largest arms exporter, after the US. On building its nuclear arsenal, the UK spent £18.7 billion.
 
And when Jeremy Corbyn ( remember him?) was hesitant about whether he would, if necessary, press the nuclear button, he was dismissed as an irresponsible politician and told he clearly wasn’t cut out to fill the role of British prime minister.
 
Yet a succession of these British prime ministers have called on Irish people to forsake the path of violence and look to progress in peaceful ways, through politics.
 
As WB Yeats almost said:  “A sense of irony’s dead and gone/It’s with O’Leary in the grave.”