Most civilised people will have taken a certain amount of satisfaction from the fate of Michael McNulty who, upon observing a pedestrian of more equatorial hue than his own on Dorset Street, cried: "Hey you, you nigger, go home to your own country, you black bastard." However, just behind Michael McNulty were two young man police officers: Det Garda Kevin Keyes and Det Garda Kevin Stratford. They immediately arrested him; and the other day Michael McNulty was deservedly given one month in the slammer for his pains, writes Kevin Myers
Now the most salient feature of this case is, of course, the first name of the two gardaí. It is universally agreed that people called Kevin are upright, true, hard-working, intelligent, thoughtful and kind.
Wherever you see an old lady trying to hobble across the road, and being driven back by thundering juggernauts, you will see a Kevin coming to her rescue, a small smile of nobility playing about his intelligent, artistic features. He saunters to the centre of the road, raises a hand that is at once commanding yet sensitive - one that could no doubt grace a keyboard with feline delicacy - and brings the howling, polywheeled beasts to a juddering halt.
Lorry drivers weep
With a courteous gesture he waves the lady across the road, and tentatively, she begins her small journey. He offers her an elbow - see, how inoffensively and unpatronisingly he does it - and graciously she accepts. As the two of them walk across the road, large-bellied lorry drivers dismount from their cabs and weep with shame at their hitherto ungentlemanly conduct. On the spot, they form the League For Lorrily Courtesy to Ladies on the Road.
Look! Two Clydesdales, maddened by wasps and out of control, are charging through the village! What? A crocodile of blind Vietnamese orphans is crossing the street, accompanied by their nurse, a deaf Angolan lady in a wheelchair! What can stop those berserk stallions rampaging into the infants, bringing catastrophe all round? Scan the streets. Is there help at hand? There is not - merely a little asylum-seeker from the Congo, apparently powerless before this imminent calamity.
Except that he is not. For this is Kevin nGubu, who, though he has consumed just 14 calories in the past month, is full of sinew and pluck. He leaps into the path of Clydesdales and vaults aboard one, even though he has never seen a horse before, never mind one the size of his parliament building back home. Standing on its back, he swats the wasps into abject submission, and they slink home, their stings between their legs, and then crouching over his steed's neck, he speaks a few words of his mBwugbwe dialect into its ear.
The horse is instantly calmed - and its serenity is infectious, for the other horse ceases to froth and storm. By the time the two Clydesdales have reached the orphans, they are gambolling playfully and whinnying with glee. The children scramble up onto them, and they go for a ramble over hill and dale, pausing for watercress sandwiches, fairy cakes and lashings of ginger beer, and what a time is had by all!
Leaders of the world
But stay! A fire has broken out in the starboard engine of a jumbo jet! And look, aboard it are the leaders of the world, en route for a conference to end war and bring peace everywhere. They are doomed! Yet, miraculously, along the wing, crawls a small oriental figure, a fire extinguisher in his hand. It is a tiny Chinese stowaway named Kevin Wong. Clinging to the aileron with his teeth, he puts the fire out.
Cheering erupts within. Kofi Annan, after briefly denouncing his parents for not naming him Kevin Annan, welcomes the hero aboard. But suddenly, disaster strikes a second time: THE PILOT HAS A HEART ATTACK! And there is no one who can fly the plane!
The Pope despairingly falls to his knees. Blair weeps. Alone of all the world's heads of state, Mary McAleese holds her nerve, and after leading them all in Nearer My God to Thee, she asks plaintively: "Is there a Kevin in the house?" Tumbling out of an overhead locker comes Kevin Sher Khan from Kashmir, also a stowaway, who pushes his way into the cockpit, turfs the dead body aside, and safely lands the liner. As he steps down from the plane, small proletarians emerge from nearby mine and mill, and, taking their caps in their hands, knuckle their foreheads obsequiously - invariably the way proles behave in the company of a Kevin.
"'Twas nothing," he sniffs, flicking a tiny piece of dust from his otherwise irreproachable Mechlin lace cuff. The proles hurl their caps in the air in salutation, and uttering loud if incomprehensible cheers in Prolish, carry the two plucky Kevins shoulder-high to the town hall, where they are given the freedom of the borough.
Legendary lovers
"Who are those guys?" asks President Bush admiringly from the back of the throng.
"Just a couple of ordinary lads called Kevin," murmurs Nicole Kidman. "As lovers, Kevins are legendary for their ardour, their sensuousness, their endurance and their powers of recov. . ." - she pauses, gulps, utters a little cry, "Oh Kevin", and then swoons.
"In addition, Irish Kevins make superb police officers," declares President McAleese.
"I could certainly do with a couple to head up the CIA and the FBI," murmurs President Bush wistfully. "I'll give you Texas for them."
"Plus California." she replies emphatically. "And two aircraft carriers."
"Done!" he cries. "And I got the bargain."
President McAleese turns to her aide. "Get me the Garda station for Dorset Street, now! Thank God for Kevins!"