It Turns Out the Gardaí have a Sense of Humour

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Okay, maybe thinking that our local agency of law and order has a sense of humour is going too far. They still have Joan Collins over the barrel in the courts and at least one journalist’s teeth on their kill list, but ever since the Guardians of the Peace started manning their communications office with civilian members their Twitter account has become a little less frosty. Ever since An Garda Síochána consented to become Denis O’Brien’s private security firm we all knew the organisation was a joke, but now at least they are sharing in the joke and giving us all a bit of a laugh.

It started when someone connected with me on Twitter retweeted a Garda response to a wisecrack they had made about a picture taken of an officer standing in line at a doughnut shop. As @GardaTraffic was included in the original tweet, which read “There’s a joke here,” the person in command at Garda Twitter HQ replied simply “You had me at Doughnut.” I was trying to eat my breakfast when I read it, and until that moment I had no idea that porridge and jam could get through my nostrils. Pure comic genius, and what’s more – no one’s skull got broken. So I did what any reasonable person would do. I tweeted the Gards.

Yes, I was eating breakfast late in the day. This is post-solvency Ireland and the demands of work somehow don’t seem as pressing anymore. Last days of the Raj and all that. Plus Robbie Rinder follows me on Twitter. I felt I owed it to him to pull a sickie and see what sort of craic was to be had in his courtroom. Since this was, in the most technical sense, a legal matter, I thought who better to ask than the police? True to form, it took the tweeting officer almost five hours to get back to me, but his or her answer was worth the wait – unlike the wait after making an emergency call.

You can’t beat that sort of carry on with a stick. Now I’m not sure if this newfound sense of humour makes up for all the times they have beaten me with a stick, but it does show that there is something happening between their ears – even if that is just a witty use of the Miranda rights statement. I’ll give the whole experience this much: It certainly presents the opportunity of taking hoax tweeting to a whole new level, and it has me wondering if the Fire Brigade or… Hmm… Homeland Security and the FBI have similar jokers at their Twitter desks. It’s worth a shot. Well if you don’t hear from me for a while…

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