A national emergency... time for Willie and the Website

IT’S the near future. There has been a nuclear emergency and Defence Minister Willie O’Dea has urgently switched the nation over to “Zulu Time” — but don’t panic — you have your lavishly produced €2m booklet by your side telling you to, er, stay indoors and listen to the radio.

“Zulu Time” is the sexy new name for Greenwich Mean Time, but we are not allowed to call it GMT, and has officially been renamed UTC (Universal Time Concept). The national emergency co-ordination centre (NECC) shows it is ready to deal with anything by moving two of its clocks forward one hour to match up with GMT, sorry UTC, or “Zulu Time” as the army prefer to call it.

The world’s 24 time zones are all assigned alpha-bravo-style alphabetical prefixes, so there were only two letters left for the military to name UTC with, and presumably, “Yankee Time” would have offended even more people than the UK connection.

Strange that Ireland should be so keen on wiping the Union Jack off the face of time given that crown forces will be allowed to operate south of the border if disaster strikes, according to Willie.

But they will not be distributing those infamous iodine tablets if Sellafield finally does make the wind glow.

How Willie scoffed at the very idea: the iodine tablets were an expensive public relations disaster that has forever tainted the public’s faith in government crisis management.

No, the tablets have been quietly dropped because the British are bringing in a new type of nuclear plant.

“Best international practice would be to distribute the iodine tablets only within a short distance of a nuclear reactor. Now as you are aware, we don’t have any nuclear reactors in this country, so hence we’ve decided to dispense with that proposal,” Willie pointed out in a drive-by patronisation of assembled press.

When it was pointed out that many British reactors are 40 years old, and presumably possess the same threat the great iodine umbrella was going to save us from, Willie’s homegrown nuclear fallout shield — his moustache — bristled into action as he retreated behind it and directed further queries to the website.

He then defended splashing out €2m on a booklet, which told you to deal with nuclear disaster by keeping spare batteries for your radio to one side and avoid wandering around in the fallout. Willie insisted the pamphlet was merely a taster and much more information would be found on the website, where it would also be in Chinese, Polish and Russian.

So, that’s all clear then. As long as the major nuclear incident doesn’t affect the internet or electricity supplies when Zulu Time hits, we should all be fine.