Trip to Tipp needed for PS, I Love You author

Cecelia Ahern has written best-selling novels, one of which, PS, I Love You, could become an award-winning film when it is released at the end of the year.

But while the younger Ahern daughter would seem to have inherited a flair for the creative arts from proud parents Bertie and Miriam (one would guess more likely the latter), it would also appear they neglected to fully teach geography to their nearest and dearest.

What is worse, the part of Ireland which has lead to a blooper from Cecelia should be especially well-known to daddy.

One would think with the amount of times Bertie needs to pontificate about garda numbers and issues in public, and no doubt in private, he would be forever talking about the officers’ teaching college in Tipperary.

However, apparently he did not rant about it enough in front of the young Cecelia for she seems to have misplaced it in her fifth book, A Place Called Here.

Her complex main character Sandy Shortt, according to the blurb for the book, is “obsessed with missing things”.

The poor woman must have had big problems finding the garda training college where she was supposed to be trained.

“I’d been accepted in the Garda Síochána. I was due to move to Cork to train at Templemore in a few months,” wrote Ms Ahern in the first-person guise of her character at the start of the 11th chapter.

As Sandy Shortt must surely have learnt after a couple of train journeys up and down the Cork-Dublin line, she should have got off in Tipperary to find her alma mater.

It is also a little surprising that throughout Ms Ahern’s own journalistic training in Dublin’s Griffith College, she had no cause to hear or read about the garda training college which fills so many column inches of the newspapers (usually as a result of some promise by her own father’s Government).