Flash Gormley and the planet of the damned

On an isolated planet, many light years away from civilisation, a calamity was unfolding. The inhabitants of this place, called Ireland, were under attack from the very people picked to lead them to prosperity. There was nowhere to hide: these people and their innocent children were being bombarded with weapons known as income tax, income levies, pension levies, carbon tax and other dastardly ordnance. The evil Count Cowen and his cohort of accomplices were doing all in their power to destroy the poor inhabitants of this land. The rulers were nowhere to be seen when natural disasters hit the planet – floods, ice, snow. The people cried out for help: “A grain of salt, please, please Master, or even a bit of sand…anything that will halt the slaughter on our roads. You have taken all our wealth; now, we beseech you, just give us a bit of salt.†But the leaders were oblivious to the suffering of their downtrodden underlings. You see, Count Cowen and his accomplices had been fed the potent Power Potion by their parents who, before them, had been administered it by their parents. So, there was no escaping it – these men and women would be driven forever more by an insatiable thirst for power. One of Count Cowen's co-conspiritors, Princess Mary the Merciless, uttered one day: “Look, water is leaking from the minions' eyes.†Count Cowen replied: “It's what they call tears; it's a sign of their weakness. That is why I relish so much in their destruction – they are so pathetically inferior to us.†So Mary the Merciless probed a little deeper. “Your Majesty, will you destroy them entirely?†she asked. “Later, my dear, I like to play with things awhile before annihilation,†he replied. Word of this injustice soon reached every corner of the universe, and soon one man decided he was the only one who could halt this destruction. Flash Gormley - Saviour of the Universe, King of the Impossible - whose mission was to save every one of them: every human, every stag, every worm. Flash arrived to save the Irish on his pedal powered airbike, determined to fight the forces of evil. Well, sort of: he was actually driven in his triphibian, turbo-boosted, liquid hydrogen-guzzling X-100 spaceship which he discretely swapped for the pedal thingymabob before being spotted. But no one needs to know this, so we won't bother mentioning it. Flash quickly set about waging an unmerciful war against all things he deemed a threat to the planet. Eventually, the people began to twig that Flash Gormley was not thinking along the same lines as themselves. Sure, the environment was important to them, but the economy was the main concern, for more people were becoming destitute by the day. But Flash assured them that he had everything under control, and that, very soon, the evil cows would all be exterminated. “No, not a cow – Cowen; Cowen and Co are the root of our troubles,†the people protested. But Flash was now on a rampage, having been slipped a good dose of a mind-altering potion that rendered the would-be Saviour of the Universe completely paranoid towards the harmless, inoffensive cows on the planet. One night, plagued by horrible, hideous nightmares in which cows from every corner of Ireland were plotting his and humanity's destruction, Flash had an idea: he would hook up the cows to mad-looking apparatuses and prove, beyond a doubt, that these animals' belches were indeed to blame for every earthquake, volcanic explosion, flood and tornado on the planet. No matter how the people tried, there was no getting through to Flash; by now, he was deemed to be quite clinically insane. They tried to communicate how important the national cattle herd was to their survival. Cowen, not the cows, had destroyed all other industry in the land and the only thing keeping the poor Irish from total emaciation was the few agricultural products they could export to other planets. Among these crucial exports were meat products. But Flash decided that the herd would have to be reduced by 37 per cent. Even though farming was the one industry that had always sustained the Irish through rough times, Flash was not for turning – the cows would have to go. As for Count Cowen and his corrupt cohort, they were now actually being protected by Flash Gormley, for they promised him he could do whatever he liked as long as he sided with them and kept them in power. The last time planet Ireland was seen, it was being sucked down the nastiest wormhole every seen in the universe. And Cowen and Co, whatever became of them? They were just fine – they all hopped on the first spaceship available and blasted off into retirement on some faraway holiday planet, never to give another thought to planet Ireland again.