A typical Loughmacrory working day

A successful raid on most homes in Loughmacrory late last night has proven fruitless despite the discovery of 48 poitin-making distilleries within a two-mile radius. This morning, the judge accepted the unanimous defence plea that they didn’t know what they were doing was illegal. The midnight swoop caught most of the townland on the hop with the PSNI quoting up to 6000 litres of the homemade alcohol retrieved. They had been tipped off by the loose talk around Omagh regarding a permanent state of happy drunkiness in Loughmacrory as well as a persistent alcoholic haze in the general area.

“I’d just finished brewing my 6th bottle of the night and was about to shut up shop when the peelers burst in,”  a local cat castrator told us. “I thought they were here for the poaching but they just starting lifting the drop of the hard stuff. I told them it was £7 a bottle and the main man told me not to be cheeky. How were we to know it was illegal? I’d never saw no adverts on it and it isn’t in the ten commandments.”

At the trial this morning it soon emerged that no one in Loughmacrory thought it was outside the law. One mother told the judge that she’d often send her children to school with a pinch of poitin in their flasks “cos it was cheaper than diluted juice”. The jury took no time to decide that the locals should be given a by-ball as long as they all undertake a course in what’s lawful in today’s society.

Judge McGrath concluded:

“It is abundantly clear now that Loughmacrory has been overlooked when it comes to the rules and regulations of law abiding citizenship. Further investigations have shown up no pre-conception of car insurance, road tax, land laws, tv or dog licensing, VAT and every other government tax going. It really is the back-end of beyond, time-locked in a period perhaps before Christ himself. All families will undertake a 12-week induction into normal day-to-day life in the 21st century.”

He added that their skills were above average as he had sampled the poitin himself and that it “wasn’t bad at all for seven quid“.