It's the best part of 25 years since A Flock Of Seagulls were in the spotlight, all silk shirts and waterfall hairstyles. A lot has changed since, thank goodness, but seagulls are back in the headlines - and for reasons far more sinister than the kinetic synths of 'I Ran'.
Around the country, reports of winged miscreants have been nothing less than ubiquitous. They range from the relatively tame – persistent squawking and ice-cream theft – to the genuinely troubling, such as the man who required a tetanus shot after being attacked by gulls off the coast of Kerry. Indeed it appears that, similar to Gaelic Footballers, they breed'em differently in the Kingdom. Two sheep were killed by the birds last month - allegedly, I should say, as no one has yet been charged. One assumes that a file is currently with the DPP.
Interestingly, it was a Kerry senator who brought the issue of Dublin’s seagull population to the floor of our nation’s upper house recently. Ned O’Sullivan told the Seanad that seagulls in the capital have “lost the run of themselves.”
So we asked the question: have they?
On the Hot Presseditorial floor, a plan was hatched: to send yours truly out into the trenches to see what was up. Our Health & Safety boffins insisted that some heavy duty protection would be required and soon - dressed like a member of Devo – I was off. Lunch in the great outdoors, we surmised, should attract some of the punkier elements among the seagull community. And if I were to be fatally wounded by sharp-beaked aggressors, well, our snapper Kathrin Baumbach would be on hand to see if I really would, as they say in the border counties, ‘make a nice corpse’.
In fact the more I thought about it, the better the idea seemed. I even had the headline worked out.
RAGING GULL! The Perp They dubbed The Beast Shows No Remorse After Grisly Murder of Hot Press Journo.
By this stage, I was rather looking forward to being a martyr (not to mention seeing who turned up for my funeral). Sadly, it didn’t quite play out like that.
I swear, I did everything I could to entice them into a brazen assault. Following David Cameron’s revelation that a seagull had once robbed the ham out of a sambo on his holliers, I was totally convinced that my own protruberant roll would be a target. Not so. Indeed the gulls circling the Liffey appeared to be more concerned with spreading their wings in the summer sun than with getting a taste of what I was scarfing down so conspicuously.
Even when the bloody crumbs started falling, the only flying feeders to be found were pigeons, and they were hardly frightening: I was able to feed the stupid little wimps by hand.
For my next trick I produced a cheeky bag of Doritos. I had been warned, of course, that this was a massive risk, given that a Newcastle, UK gull was once so enamoured with the chips that he shuffled his way into a shop and helped himself to a bag, the whole thing of course being caught on CCTV and stuck up on YouTube. But the gulls of Ireland remained unimpressed: I enjoyed a bag of Chili Heatwave without simulating even the slightest interest from the wretched of the sky.
To round off my working lunch, it felt only right to go with the old reliable – a classic 99. Surely a cone piled high with luxuriously white ice cream, and with a perfect shaft of sweet and crumbly flake pointing skywards, would bring them flocking. It was another disaster. Suffice to say that even while adopting a Statue of Liberty pose in the middle of Temple Bar, the overhead squawking was minimal, and my dessert remained untouched. Except for the bloke from the stag party who came along and grabbed it from me and ran off so fast that I didn’t even think of giving chase. Oh alright, I was afraid. There were ten of them...
Still anxious for a scoop – a journalistic scoop, that is – I headed back to HP Towers with a baguette held aloft on the point of my brolly. Cruelly, there was ne’er a gull to be found. Weirdly, however, I was beginning to look like the pigeon equivalent of the Pied Piper, leading an increasingly large contingent on a waddle through the streets. But those much-feared pests of the capital, the paramilitaries of the provisional seagull movement, kept their distance. I think someone must have warned them that I was secretly carrying a knife...
In conclusion? Everyone back at HP HQ insisted that this was proof positive that the citizens of Dublin have nothing to worry about. I disagree. In fact I suspect that, unlike me, our editorial team have proven that they are, indeed, far too gullible. Easily taken in, as it were, by so much gullshit. But I am ready for them. Except next time I will be carrying a gun...