Unanswered questions: Did they find the Higgs? Which is Edward?

IT WAS A tumultuous year. Aren’t they all? But before we move on, there are a few outstanding issues to be addressed from the 12 months just past. We might not always get neat answers to them, but, nevertheless, here are five questions that will linger from 2011.

Would Seán Gallagher have been elected president if it hadn’t been for the tweet?

It’s imaginable that somewhere in Seán Gallagher’s house is a room kitted out as a mock Áras, where he sits, Rupert Pupkin-like, and pretends he is president: signs bills, gives addresses, gathers his dogs together and denotes them council of state, that sort of thing. He was this close to being president. And then, as the floods rose outside, he was washed away. Did the fake tweet do it for him? Was it Martin McGuinness’s creepily expert interrogation technique? Or was the public only toying with him in the first place, and was it always going to jump ship when it came to voting time?

We’ll never know, although I get the feeling that if he had won, we wouldn’t have been allowed to sit down even for a minute. He’d be telling us to stay motivated, keep working, show spirit, sell, sell, sell. It would have been exhausting.

Instead we have Michael D Higgins, who just tells us we’re great, and to keep remembering that we’re great, and instead of asking us to invent some new product or other has asked us to develop instead a new sense of Irishness, which he hopes to bring to the market within a seven-year period.

Which is John and which is Edward?

Three years on, and no one knows. In Jedward’s Olympia panto, they have an E and J on each of their backs and you still can’t tell them apart.

They were our Eurovision representatives, and they came eighth: do you remember how proud we were?

One of the reasons Jedward endure is that they are Jedward. Nothing shall ever sunder that. You’re not going to find one of them expressing his individuality by making a jazz concept album based on James Joyce’s Dubliners. They are Jedward and will be forever. Until one of them is struck by male-pattern baldness.

Are the Occupy Dame Street people there for good?

They have become a bit of a tourist attraction in Dublin. It’s a measly protest really – just a handful of them at any one time, making it less of a tent city and more of a tent boreen – but, still, they have braved it out for this long sustained by contributions from the public, by their own determination and by regular trips to the 24-hour Centra next door.

They pitched their demands a little high. Put the IMF and ECB out of Irish affairs? They might as well have asked for €10 million and a plane to fly them to Cuba – but they have attracted attention and held it, and they bring some colour to Dame Street. If the Central Bank of Ireland moves its headquarters to the Anglo building on North Wall Quay, it will ruin the spirit of the stand-off.

Did they find the Higgs boson or not?

Not quite, because it wasn’t as easy to observe as the disappointment of the world’s media, who had produced countless fact boxes and splashes explaining the particle in advance of its discovery.

They will get to dust them off again at some stage, so that by the end of 2012 we’ll all be experts in subatomic physics.

In the meantime, the headline in The Irish Times– " 'God Particle' may or may not exist" – was clearly a sly reference to Erwin Schrödinger's seminal thought experiment in which a cat is both alive and dead in a box until an observer collapses its superposition of quantum states. That's how we roll.

Mrs Brown’s Boys? Seriously?

It was our most successful cultural export of 2011, moving from RTÉ to the BBC and in the process becoming such a success that Brendan O’Carroll has become a Bafta nominee and a star of the channel’s Christmas schedule.

The funniest thing about the show wasn’t its script but the indignation of all right-thinking people at the success of this comedy throwback. Every million new viewers brought them closer to a stroke. Insert Brendan O’Carroll-esque quip here. They need to relax and accept it for the success it is: one comedy among many options available across the spectrum.

Alternatively, they can think of Mrs Brown’s Boys as metacomedy that harkens to previous sitcoms, from Tony Hancock to Seán Hughes, in breaking down the fourth wall while deconstructing 1970s comedy stereotypes and feeding Britain’s renewed desire for traditional, post-Office sitcom. Badum-tish.

shegarty@irishtimes.com

Twitter: @shanehegarty