Where Are They Now? Roscommon

It’s a question that has plagued the Nation for close to 10 years now, but still it persists: just where is Roscommon now?

A welcome presence on the map of Ireland for countless millennia, it was on this day in 2005 that puzzled residents of Sligo, Mayo, Galway, Offaly, Westmeath, Longford and Leitrim awoke to find that their neighbouring county had vanished.

“It was there, I mean the ground of it, the dirt was still there I suppose, but the houses, the people, the roads, the fields had just vanished,” explained Longford priest Eddie O’Dowd, “I hadn’t seen anything like it until that day and I’ve seen nothing like it since”.

The Fianna Fáil Government of the day was slow to react to calls for an investigation as Roscommon didn’t account for that many votes, however they did issue a new map with a Roscommon shaped hole in the middle of Ireland. The Government’s lack of action left a void into which the public threw their half baked theories.

There was talk of a Rapture, a punishment from God for Roscommon’s pitiful contribution to senior Gaelic football in the previous years as well as a Cork perpetrated conspiracy in which they were supposed to dig a tunnel to Roscommon, sucking its contents into a giant tube for storage somewhere in the Rebel county.

Then famously the three eyed woman of Lough Key appeared on RTÉ’s The Late Late Show claiming to have received visions from Roscommon natives in purgatory. The woman was declared a fraud as under the studio lights, the glue she had used to fasten her third eye to her forehead melted prompting the plastic eye to fall to the studio floor.

“I suppose you miss them alright,” offered Sligo local Eileen Cummings, “I mean the view is unquestionably nicer, but still, that’s a lot of people who are likely dead,” Cummings added, pointing out her window at the vast muddy tundra which went on for miles.

The Government finally acted in the months that followed, banning all travel within the not-a-county-anymore for fear that if Roscommon was the victim of a silent nuclear strike there may be high levels of radiation, but once again citing how checking up on that would win them no votes, the Fianna Fáil led Government resolved to fill it in with water. But still no answers as to what happened until now.

“Do I feel let down? You could say that, but I suppose I’m lucky too,” Gerry Manning, who now lives in Dublin with his girlfriend told WWN.

Speaking for the first time of how he went to the shops in Westmeath early one morning only to return to his Roscommon home to find it was gone Manning was shaken: “I’d only jumped in the car for about 10 minutes and that was that. Gone forever, well until my wife Margaret rang me there yesterday”.

Margaret Manning presumed to be one of the dead, made contact just yesterday with her husband. “She was quite angry actually, she was wondering when I was planning on seeing the kids,” Manning revealed.

The lines of communication, absent for years kept flooding in, a letter purporting to be from the Roscommon county council began “lads, this is getting fucking ridiculous, we know you’re avoiding us, cop the fuck on will you”.

“You even tried flooding the place with water, yiz bastards”.

There it was, miraculously, the people of Roscommon have magically reappeared with madcap tales about how the rest of the country had been ignoring them for the past 10 years.

“This is possibly a case of mass hysteria, with Roscommon believing we have been ignoring them for the last 10 years when in reality they are simply avoiding the reality of the situation, which is that they were probably abducted by aliens,” explained Dublin based psychologist Aine Harrison.

“I’ve been waving at that bitch Eileen Cummings from my garden across the road from her in Sligo and the cow would look through me like I wasn’t there,” said returned Roscommoner Mary White, seemingly refuting claims that Roscommon was a barren land devoid of human activity.

The coalition Government strenuously denied claims ‘Roscommon has always been there’ and said it would launch an inquiry into how it returned ‘out of nowhere’.

“The notion that we were simply ignoring a whole county in favour of pursuing far more voter-friendly endeavours are accurate, I mean eh inaccurate,” the Taoiseach explained at the formal launch of the inquiry.