The eighties revival continues - now it's bomb scares, delays on the tube, and coded warning phone calls to local radio stations. Except this time the men in charge are some bunch of metaphysicists calling themselves the Real IRA.

Apparently the Real IRA have decided the real IRA aren't sufficiently IRA-esque. So the Real IRA have decided to do something about it - they're going to get seriously IRA on our asses. They're going to… ooh I don't know, blow up a taxi near the BBC or something.

This could be just the beginning.

For years philosophers have argued about the difference between what is Real and what is Really Real. How long before we're facing a campaign of terror by the Really Real This Time IRA, or The Baggsy We're The IRA.

And there are semantic difficulties with all this before you even put your balaclava helmet on. If they really are the Real IRA, then who are the other lot, the real, I mean the old, that is, the plain old IRA?

Also how real is Real? And if a group of men blow up a taxi in a forest and there's no BBC camera crew there to watch, are they still the IRA?

But the real point, the only one point worth making to the IRA en bloc - real, unreal, synthetic, polyester, whatever - is this: we are not interested. We don't care. Your average Londoner is just not worth bombing. Look, we don't even vote. We're concerned with questions like whether the Popstars band can actually sing live, or who shot Phil Mitchell.

The only way you could possibly get our attention, lads, is to splinter once more into two further groups: The Surreal IRA, who make their demands felt by tossing burning giraffes from the top floors of Parisian garretts; and Réal IRA, a fiery, Hispanic football team who can dazzle us all with their incandescent set pieces.

That bombing thing? So passé.

by Barney