Send in the creepy clowns

'The Government has urged everyone to stay calm about the creepy clowns and has said that in fact they are our friends' Photo: PA

The co-called 'creepy clown' phenomenon hit Ireland last week as the country was terrorised by clowns with red noses and big, fake, painted-on rictus grins. While creepy clowns up to now have been armed with chainsaws and knives, these clowns were armed with really long speeches, where they told us loads of stuff that we had already read in the papers for the past few weeks.

The chief creepy clown is a man known to his associates as 'Baldy'. He has a menacing smile and talks in a very low but extremely scary kind of monotone. His associate is a younger clown known as Paschal (pronounced in the French style), who only recently graduated from clown school and who is said to be less obviously menacing but just as bad in his own way. This pair performed traditional clown tricks last week when they made an extra few hundred million appear from nowhere, unsuccessfully juggled everyone's competing demands, filled balloons with hot air, and ended up slipping on banana skins and getting pie on their faces.

The Government has urged everyone to stay calm about the creepy clowns and has said that in fact they are our friends. Indeed, there is talk now that the Government may offer grants for creepy clowns to mind children while their mothers go out to work. Tulsa is said to be engaging with the creepy clown union to encourage creepy clowns to get proper accreditation. The feeling is that this will leave more grandparents free to spend their extra five euro by going on cruises and down to the bingo and so forth.

Furthermore, there is talk of creepy clowns being drafted in to manage schools while teachers are out on strike. Children are generally quite unruly and disrespectful to substitute teachers but the feeling is that they won't give any trouble to a creepy clown armed with a chainsaw and a machete.

There is even talk that creepy clowns could be drafted in to do all kinds of other thankless jobs. For example, one suggestion doing the rounds is that the Government should set up a creepy clown convention of 99 randomly selected clowns to take the issue of Repeal the Eighth off the table for a year or two.

There have been warnings, too, though that people should be careful around creepy clowns. Some of them have special powers and can be very difficult to kill. They just keep popping back up. One infamous creepy clown, known as 'High Five', has been stalking the country for years now, terrifying children with his fake sideways grin and his trademark moves, like 'thumbs up' and the eponymous 'high five'. High Five has been written off, assumed dead, on more than one occasion but he keeps coming back to life and it seems even his arch-enemy, Leo the clown, can't dispense with him.

Sunday Independent