Word: irishness
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Nowadays, even a stray pair of tweezers or a bottle of saline solution can make a journey through airport security an unpleasant experience. So when Irish authorities were alerted on Tuesday that a man had passed through Dublin Airport days earlier carrying high-grade plastic explosives, it's not surprising that a large-scale security alert was triggered. The roads around the 49-year-old electrician's apartment in Dublin were cordoned off, and bomb-disposal experts searched the premises, turning up 3 oz. of the powerful explosive material RDX. The amount was greater than what Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab...
...returned to Ireland from his native Slovakia on Jan. 2, was promptly arrested by police and detained for questioning. Good news, right? The Irish authorities could congratulate themselves on foiling a potential terrorist threat, couldn't they? Not quite. (See pictures of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab...
What happened next is not entirely clear. Slovakian authorities say they immediately contacted their counterparts at Dublin Airport to explain the situation, but the Dublin Airport Authority says it did not hear from the Slovakians until Tuesday morning. (According to the Irish media, a telex went to the wrong number.) Slovakian officials described the oversight as a "silly and unprofessional mistake" and apologized to the Irish. But in a statement from the Slovakian Interior Ministry, the government took exception to the arrest of the passenger: "[For an] incomprehensible reason, [the police] took the person into custody and undertook further security...
...material in the man's bag could have exploded mid-flight. "On their own, this type of explosive does need to be combined with other elements to make it into a bomb, but obviously this type of high-grade explosive is potentially extremely dangerous," Commandant Gavin Young, an Irish Defense Forces spokesman, said in an interview with the Irish national broadcaster...
...Irish still refer to the holiday as St. Stephen's Day, and they have their own tradition called hunting the wren, in which boys fasten a fake wren to a pole and parade it through town. Also known as Wren Day, the tradition supposedly dates to 1601, to the Battle of Kinsale, in which the Irish tried to sneak up on the English invaders but were betrayed by the song of an overly vocal wren - although this legend's veracity is also highly debated. Years ago, a live wren was hunted and killed for the parade, but modern sentiments deemed...