IF THERE’S ONE surefire way to get yourself into the hallowed inches of Surrealing in the Years, it’s to be a weird animal that has escaped from something. Even better if you are 15,000 weird animals, and you’re on the loose in Donegal.

Perhaps it is fair to say that the ill-fated crab escape of January 2026 is but a fleeting fancy. That several years from now, nobody will remember the time that 15,000 crabs made a mad dash for freedom after a lorry crash, and emergency services had to close the roads to collect all of the crabs like some kind of video game. 

The story ends with the crabs being reloaded into the lorry and sent off to Portugal, where one assumes they’ll be eaten. I actually don’t know anything about crabs. I don’t know if they have feelings. If they yearn for freedom, as mankind does. Still, when the rest of the world has forgotten about the time that 15,000 crabs nearly made it to freedom in Donegal, Surrealing in the Years will remember. 

Breaking up with Enoch

In the interest that this column might some day serve as a time capsule for some future generation wondering about the pervasive themes and throughlines in Irish society at this moment in time, it seems fair enough to note that Enoch Burke is outside that damn school again. 

I don’t remember what the gates of my own school looked like, but I could probably draw the gates outside Wilson’s Hospital School in Westmeath from memory. 

Truthfully, there is very little joy to be had in writing about Enoch Burke. There’s barely even schadenfreude. At the end of the day, we’re talking about a young man wasting his life behind bars (prison or school gate, take your pick) in order to appease an outermost fringe interpretation of an ideology he was raised with. 

There is an argument to be made that Enoch Burke isn’t worth covering at all anymore. That’s actually where I tend to come down on the issue, most weeks, which is why I have often ignored it as a topic even as he stands forlornly outside of those schoolgates, deserving nothing but society’s most contemptuous laughter.

And while I may laugh contemptuously in my private life, it is not always clear to me why we need to know that Burke has been let out of prison for Christmas any more than we need to know about the movements of anyone else who passes through the Irish prison system. 

Sure, it means we’re on alert for when he inevitably turns up outside the school again, after which he’ll be sent back to jail for the cycle to begin anew. There can be little doubt that our collective refusal to look away from the Burke story plays into the family’s strategy of maximising publicity, and there is surely a distinct possibility that he would give up that kind of carry-on if the media embraced some kind of self-imposed moratorium. Maybe those children could finally get back to learning about ox-bow lakes in peace. 

If there was any meaningful support for Enoch Burke, it would have materialised by now. It hasn’t. If the courts could figure out a way to strike a balance between keeping him out of prison and keeping him away from the school, they would. They can’t. Maybe it’s our turn to say enough is enough. Sorry Enoch, it’s not you, it’s us. Except for it definitely is him, let’s be honest, but, you know, for the sake of being polite and all that. 

Between a Grok and a hard place

After the outcry over last week’s Grok-nudification scandal, the Irish government and An Garda Síochána seem to be taking the matter more seriously than they originally intended to. Also, sorry for the phrase ‘Grok-nudification scandal’. 

Musk has claimed that Grok will no longer be permitted to generate images such as these. There is no reason to trust Musk’s word, of course, and at the time of writing, no such ban has actually been implemented. AI Minister Niamh Smyth has since met with X to ‘directly express her serious dismay’, but as things stand, there are still no concrete consequences for X as a company. 

Even with Musk’s promise to throttle Grok’s nudification feature, this action feels a little bit like shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted. Or to put a finer point on it, it feels like pretending to shut off the sexual abuse material machine after it has already been revealed how desperately unprepared the world is for an era where the most visceral violations can be visited upon anyone as easily as ordering a takeaway. 

Patrick O’Donovan has spent more time whinging that his comments were taken out of context, perhaps hoping that people will forget that his immediate reaction to this scandal was to insulate X, Grok and Elon Musk from responsibility, before a volte-face brought about only by public outcry. 

It is, however, impossible to overstate the threat that this kind of technology poses to any kind of normal way of life. The threat of this kind of abuse, the ease of access and use, should give everyone pause about rapid advancements in generative AI, lest we end up in some kind of Grok-nudified future. 

What don’t we know?

One disconcerting detail to emerge this week is that Irish people have an extremely skewed idea of various immigration figures, believing the number of people born abroad living in Ireland to be significantly higher than it really is. These misconceptions persist in other key areas, such as the prison population and housing. 

People guessed that around 43.8% of people born outside of Ireland were availing of social housing, compared to the real figure of 6.1%. In fairness, we also seem to believe that over one-in-three Irish people are accessing social housing compared to the real figure of 9.2%, which begs the question: how much social housing do these people think that Ireland has?

Seriously, think about that for a moment. If people at large believe that nearly half of all immigrants are availing of social housing, and that over one-third of all Irish people are availing of social housing, that’s a worldview predicated on the assumption that over one-third of all housing in Ireland is social housing. How have we ended up so clueless about this, and what the hell else are we, as a population, this catastrophically wrong about? 

Well, the answer to the first question might lie in the highly exaggerated view of immigration’s impact on housing, which Tánaiste Simon Harris has been so fond of trotting out since his party’s embarrassing performance in the presidential election. Of course, Harris is not the only one, and appeasement of the Ireland is Full brigade from various corners of the political and media spectrum has surely had a hand in this very consequential misconception. 

Obviously, this strategy of connecting immigration and housing works in the minds of many, to the degree that it can actually make people overestimate how many immigrants are availing of social housing times seven. Not only that, but we actually believe the Irish government is providing that level of social housing. What world are we living in?

If we can be so wrong about this, then what else do we believe? Do we believe that the energy used by data centres is some quaint amount, rather than 22% and climbing? Do we believe that we’re in line for a slap in the wrist over our missed climate targets, rather than a €28 billion fine?

And how can we really be so damn sure that not one of those crabs escaped, huh? 15,000 is a pretty big number. You’re telling me, for certain, that they counted all those crabs? Spare me. At least one of those guys made it back to the sea, for sure.