This year’s Tyrone Valentine’s Limerick Competition was the “worst standard in living memory” prompting the county council to write an email to all school headmasters to “up the literacy skills a notch” according to sources at the Clogher Poetry Society Headquarters.

The annual poetry competition attracts thousands of entries from single men from all over the county looking for a partner. The top three poems are read out at a dance in the Clogher Halls by the winning poets who usually head home with three women from the pack who gather to hear and inspect the talented wordsters.

“Eff me pink, it was cat altogther,” Henry Wisdom, chair of the Clogher Poetry society told us. “I had to wade through mountains of pure tripe. I’d reckon that 90% of the entrants managed to slip in farm machinery or drinking. One boy, from the Moy, was able to somehow rhyme ‘X Factor’ with ‘Caterpillar Track-Type Tricycle Tractor’. Romance is dead in Tyrone. I pity the women, I really do.”

Despite the falling standards, the panel eventually managed to narrow the entrants down to three, with “Ardboe Women” getting top honours for its depiction of a man sneakily looking at a naked woman around the Lough shore.

Winning entries below:

1ST PLACE – ARDBOE WOMEN: By James Devlin

It’s great to live in Ardboe

To Moortown I’d hate to go

The women here are fair

And great when they’re bare

Like my neighbour beside me on Sundays, ghost-oh

2ND PLACE – NICE STRABANE MAIDENS: By John McElhaton

The women in Strabane are wile nice

But there’s none I can entice

What’s wrong with me?

I’ve a diesel turbo SUV

I’d buy you a chicken fried rice

3RD PLACE – LONELY IN BRACKAVILLE By Godfrey Gillis

This year I hope someone says yes

Now that I’ve a permanent address

But, if you say no

I couldn’t stick the woe

And I’ll have to torch the buckin wedding dress (that I bought in the Island)