IN THE BEFORETIMES, when Spring and Summer were pretty much indistinguishable from one another, both being mild, showery with intermittent blue skies, it was another season which heralded the official start of the holliers.

Officially, as the Dáil and Seanad roll down the shutters this week, the Silly Season is now upon us. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the expression was rather fabulously first deployed in a snarky Saturday Review article in 1861, when the writer bewailed a perceived plummet in the quality of news reportage during the period when London Times journalists headed for the holiday hills once the law courts and parliament had risen for the summer.

“The hands which at other times wield the pen for our instruction are now wielding the gun on a Scotch moor or the Alpenstock on a Swiss mountain. Work is left to feebler hands… In those months the great oracle becomes – what at other times it is not – simply silly. In spring and early summer, the Times is often violent, unfair, fallacious, inconsistent, intentionally unmeaning, even positively blundering, but it is very seldom merely silly,” the author sniffed.

Alas, modern journalism’s demands (and wages) aren’t conducive to most reporters buggering off for a spot of grouse-shooting or swanking around Switzerland for a couple of months, but the story remains the same: no parliament, no courts, and – World Cup or Olympics years excepted – a prolonged sports drought.

These are the bread-and-butter topics in the news business, but every summer the usual brisk flow of surefire headline stories slows to a trickle. However, akin to nature, the news business also abhors a vacuum and will rush to fill it. Modest yarns which at any other time of the year would languish near the end of a bulletin or in a dusty corner online or in print, are magnified, flammed up and thrust centre stage, no matter how frivolous: dogs on skateboards, famous faces found in foodstuffs, jeremiads against robbing bastard seagulls.

It’s no coincidence that some of the most bonkers news stories to spark........

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