This is Cork’s famine

That great Al Porter gag about the Irish’s love of euphemisms on The Late, Late Show last year?

It had already been done but sure it was worth another whirl. Long before Robert Benigni’s Guido character was trying to make a World War II concentration camp a game for his son Giosuè in “Life Is Beautiful”, we were appeasing that war as The Emergency and the violence in the North as The Troubles.

Sport, certainly hurling, can often indulge in the understatement too. Of the few straight red cards now shown in the game, most are often decried as severe punishment for “harmless enough” acts. Porter mentioned how The Famine was, during his school days, colloquially referred to as The Great Hunger.