By Aughohilly Schniffles

An unemployed male from Coalisland is due to appear in Dungannon District Court facing drunken disorderly charges, following a single arrest in the town on Saturday night. It is understood that the charges against the man are in relation to ‘fighting with his own reflection’ in Uncle Sam’s shop window.

Onlookers on the night described how Shane O’Neill, a trainee traditional musical spoons player from the town, left O’Neill’s bar and headed for home muttering to himself when he happened upon his own reflection in the pizza shop window.

Aggravated by the sight of himself uttering nonsense, he angrily blurted “What did you say ya slabber?” and thus began a thirty-four minute deluge of self-deprecation and insults before a single punch was thrown.

“It was a bit like that thing in primary school when you let on you want to fight, but you really don’t. You know, where you have a friend holding you back to make you look all hard… well, it was the same as that, only Shane had no-one else to hold him back, so the start dragged on a bit longer that normal before he punched the glass window…”

Another startled observer told us

“There must have been about 50 ‘naw, you come-ons’ before he opened the shooting with an overhand jab-hook.”

By the time the row had actually started, an estimated crowd of some fifteen thousand people had showed up in the town at 3am, some 12,000 more than turned out for Dennis Taylor’s homecoming in nineteen eighty-something. Some came from as far away as Cappagh, and brought their own sandwiches. We are unable to confirm the figure of fifteen thousand at this stage.

It is understood that O’Neill broke two teeth, injured three knuckles, half his beard, one eye and two ears, and has applied to the Northern Ireland Office for compensation following the fracas. No glass was harmed in the incident

Taking Stephen Nolan’s lead, O’Neill has also threatened legal action against anyone who shared videos of his ordeal on whatsapp or twitter, though this may be particularly hard to enforce, as Donald Trump shared it and got over a million re-tweets.

If anyone has the video footage of the incident, please re-tweet it to @gombeen