Nostalgia: Muff woman and man told - '˜F**k off you gobshites' (August 1992)

The Lough Swilly lifeboat was launched at 11.30 on Tuesday night to answer what appears to have been a hoax.

After a red distress flare was sighted off Fahan, the lifeboat searched for two hours without finding anything.

“We can only assume it was a hoax,” said Liam McGee, Honorary Secretary of the Lough Swilly Lifeboat Association, adding that such a hoax could put people’s lives at risk.

“If a genuine distress call had come in while the boat was out, what would have happened?

“We can’t be in two places at the same time,” he said.

Brothers to claim ‘Rockall!’

Letterkenny brothers, Philip and Fergus Gribbon, leave the Donegal fishing port of Burtonport this weekend for the rocky, windsept Atlantic island of Rockall - to claim it for the Republic! The Gribbon brothers, who have been preparing for their £20,000 invasion for the past ten years, plan to paint out the Union Jack on one side of the island - just 63ft high and 100ft across - and replace it with a Tricolour. Weather permitting the Letterkenny men leave Burtonport this weekend with a crew of two and on reaching the rock, 300 miles west of the Scottish Hebrides, intend to stay for around 24 hours.

‘Nasty soldier’ attacked

A Muff woman who alleges she and a companion were told to “...off you gobshites” by a British soldier when they were held up by a mobile patrol at Culmore is to ask James McDaid T.D. to raise the matter “at the highest level possible.” She said she has been crossing through the checkpoint nearly every day of her life but had never gone through an experience like that on Wednesday.

She claims: “The driver was told to pull in and politely told the soldier that he was late for work and could he move on through. That started what was basically an obscene tirade.”