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THE AURORA BOREALIS? At this time of year, at this time of day, in this part of the country?
Well, not quite.
Nevertheless, BBC NI’s weather presenter Barra Best might succeed in getting people to look skywards this afternoon with his April Fool’s Day prank.
He’s posted on X about the supposed “rare solar weather event called ‘Aurora Borealis Maximus’ – last seen in 1842”.
Northern Lights will be visible over Ireland today at around 3pm, during daylight. Experts say it’s caused by a rare solar weather event called “Aurora Borealis Maximus” – last seen in 1842. Send photos this way. pic.twitter.com/6Jmq8ipP3u
— Barra Best (@barrabest) April 1, 2025
“Northern Lights will be visible over Ireland today at around 3pm, during daylight,” jokes Best on X.
Elsewhere, you don’t need to worry about getting hit with a fee if you’re crossing the Ha’penny Bridge today.
Discover Dublin, with close to half a million followers on Instagram, took to the app to caution about supposed plans to introduce a €1 fee for crossing the famous bridge.
“The historic bridge will now see the reintroduction of the fee due to rising restoration and maintenance costs of the famous bridge,” Discover Dublin said in its prank.
“The €1 charge will be collected via contactless payment terminals installed at both entrances.”
And don’t worry, there are no plans to cover St Stephen’s Green with a massive net at a cost of over €8m due to seagulls who carried away a tourist, as Lovin Dublin joked on its social media page.
Have you heard that Dublin City have shared their plans to cover St.Stephen’s Green in an 89,000 square metre net? pic.twitter.com/tLb1VWz545
— Lovin Dublin (@LovinDublin) April 1, 2025
Meanwhile, there’s no need for Dublin Airport passengers to worry about their headwear, after an April Fool’s from the airport “as of today, that caps can no longer be worn at Dublin Airport”.
“The ban does not apply to bobble hats, stetsons or bucket hats,” joked Dublin Airport.
Passenger Update
— Dublin Airport (@DublinAirport) April 1, 2025
Passengers should note that, as of today, caps can no longer be worn at Dublin Airport.
Caps & national airports don’t go well together & must be removed prior to entering the terminals.
The ban does not apply to bobble hats, stetsons or bucket hats.🧢 pic.twitter.com/3EkNvx5iH3
Cork City FC also got in on the act, announcing it had signed Norwegian international defender Loof Lirpa (I wonder what that spells backwards?)
Aged only 18, Cork City joked that Lirpa is know for his “prolific goalscoring record”, having scored one goal in over 500 appearances.
Cork City FC are delighted to confirm the signing of Norwegian international defender Loof Lirpa, who joins the club after a spell in the Saudi Pro League.
— Cork City FC (@CorkCityFC) April 1, 2025
Lirpa, 18, arrives at Turner’s Cross with an impressive pedigree, having previously played in Norway’s Eliteserien and… pic.twitter.com/4LdYgul0zI
And while some people might like the thought of painting their kitchen in “full Irish breakfast fragrance paint”, don’t get caught out by this prank by Stillorgan Decor.
Full Irish breakfast and strawberry fragrance paint might sound like a good idea, but not so much with the fish fragrance paint.
Meanwhile, don’t worry, “Mary” wasn’t screwed out of a prize on RTÉ 2FM’s Breakfast show.
She took part in the show’s A-Z quiz for a €10,000 prize and flawlessly made it all the way to Z before the line cut off.
Mary was brought back on, gave the correct answer, but was informed that they couldn’t accept it as the time had elapsed.
“I’m so sorry Mary, that was an incredible performance,” said the hosts.
Later, the hosts said they were “shaking” and were inundated with irate messages.
“When we don’t hear the answer, we can’t give the prize,” said Carl Mullen.
However, they brought Mary back on to reveal that it was a “big fat April Fool’s”.
Newstalk also got in on the act, joking that US President Donald Trump had made an offer to buy Shannon Airport.
Meanwhile, FlightRadar 24 posted on X that the most tracked flight right now was the AF9999 flying from Paris to New York – an Air France Concorde.
In 2003, Air France and British Airways announced the retirement of Concorde due to rising maintenance costs and low passenger numbers.
Most tracked flight right now - #AF9999 flying from Paris to New York. pic.twitter.com/g1PRn8h1YD
— Flightradar24 (@flightradar24) April 1, 2025
Darts fans may also have been left disappointed by a prank claiming that the legendary Phil ‘The Power’ Taylor was coming out of retirement to face teenage star Luke ‘The Nuke’ Littler.
Who's ready? ☢️⚡
— Target Darts (@TargetDarts) April 1, 2025
12pm. The Nuke vs The Power.#TeamTarget pic.twitter.com/Tk6vfZB8WT
“How do I watch this,” replied one social media user who was duped by the Target Darts prank.
Elsewhere, Terry’s Chocolate promised to make “mundane teeth brushing a delight” with its prank about a new “Chocolate mint Toothpaste”.
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Frightening news. Huge employer here.
Well there is a surprise, I have a bet between Intel 1st and HP. Both very close to each other in leixlip/maynooth/celbridge
and IBM. Its quite scary
I took voluntary redundancy from Intel in 2000, they offered a savage package, if they did the same again there would be plenty of volunteers
I had to do some work in Intel a few years ago and boy it was one place I would hate to work in. The people looked stressed out and miserable.
Oh I hope Wally Mooney has some intelligent, measured and well-conceived commentary on this…
Surely Ruth Coppinger would nationalise this, just like her plan for Dell!!!
…..Any moment now
We should play Wally Bingo. Let’s see how often the post uses the following words or terms ‘workers’ ‘exploits’ capitalist’ ‘profit’ creating wealth’ solidarity with Luas and/or cadburys’
‘Gifted by capital’…’working class’….’odious debt’…’backs of workers’…’fiat currency’…’keystrokes’…YAAAAAWWWWN.
“Macro economics”
Banksters, Neo-liberals, Scabs, Rack Rents, Banker Tax, Capitalist Elite, The 1% ,
Oh, shut it.
Not you, Moran, parmesan etc.
On reflection, you also.
It would be more interesting to hear your comments Collie, John, Greg etc. ? This after all is your beloved capitalist system in action.
A highly profitable company with massive financial resources make a strategic positioning alteration, cloud focused, and dispenses with 11,000 employees who were critical to its past and present success.
Put not your trust in large corporations unless you have your timely exit strategy worked out.
Unless of course you were going to be offering those 11,000 jobs tomorrow even if just for a few short years, I think I would put my trust in a large corporation first thanks. .
True, but who in the world actually expects their employer to put their job before the good of the company? Who in the world expects their job to be secure on the decade scale? Who in the world hasn’t kept their eye on the job market even when they’re happy where they are?
Public sector workers, perhaps. That’s a very different culture though.
Krups, atari, dell, banta, all huge factories that pulled out and near destroyed one city in the country. And I’m sure there are other urban areas have been equally destroyed by big factories moving in, making micro economies and then…gone. What have we learned?
Well said Fiona, one should always read the small print and look for what they exclude. Eg mental health care for the stress these companies place. I could not believe that in Intel that in one office no one could leave until their boss left even if it Kent staying on 2/3 hours more after 5. Shocking!
When you use words such as ‘destroyed’ you lose credibility in my books Jenni. Such ridiculous hyperbole is not needed. When Krups, Dell etc left limerick left it caused an upsurge in unemployment which would be obvious, and then most got new jobs over the following years. If they had chosen never to have located operations in Ireland we would have been far worse off. You can’t keep foreign company’s here forever and ever.
Luas drivers and their union?
Fiona would you prefer they never came in the first place. Lefties you just love wallowing in misery. Never mind Intel has contributed massively to Ireland for a quarter of a century.
As an employee in Leixlip not sure what to think, VSP will be popular among people there 10+ years, but for us only in the door graduates the fear looms of uncertainty especially knowing we are easy targets for payoffs
Last in, first out which is usually total bull
Huge amount of building work going on to expand the plant in Leixlip can’t see them putting to much money into it if they’re going to sack everyone down there.
Plans change. The cost of those expansions are a drop in the ocean for them.
They’re spending 5bn there so that sites probably safe but there are sires in Cork and Shannon and those guys must be worried. Hopefully they’ll be OK.Intel have a lot invested in Ireland.
There is a link to that story from 2014 at the top of the comments. €3.5bn investment here for the new wave of technology.
They built a mega fab in arizona in 2012 and left it empty. …anything is possible
Yes but the operation in Dublin is too important. They will downscale the smaller divisions and probably admin operations given IT is now driving the admin through self service anyway. I doubt/hope not much of a cut in Dublin
Shannon and Cork are software and sales sites. Basically acquisitions. I would very much doubt they are impacted. The rationale behind this is around falling PC sales.
As time passes it takes less and less people to do a job as we automate more and let the computers take over…with a rising population, has anyone stopped and ask what will everybody do ? Answer is a revolution of epic proportions…probably after we have all long passed…but still something that will happen
Yer watching Terminator too much…
Doubt their offshore 12.5% corporation tax goldmine, or in other words ‘Ireland’ will be impacted too much,
Ireland is a cost centre for Intel, just like any other. The rate of tax is not dependent on headcount – equating the two is nonsensical.
True, I stand corrected.
I still believe there’s an argument to be made in terms of the more people these international companies employ in Ireland, the less risk of corporation tax being hiked.
Fab 24 contributed 13.2 billion to its overall output in the past year, its the only Fab currently in the world producing chips at a massive scale, still doesnt mean any of us are guarenteed our jobs in the next few months
Where is Ruth Coppinger – quick , nationalise it . The Irish can make their own chips out of potatoes. Isnt that right Ruth
Surely will have a direct impact on Irish workforce given the numbers here. You’d imagine the Dell/EMC merger will be another organisation shedding jobs as part of a restructure!
@icantiwont: Dell/EMC has already shed jobs at the start of January in Ireland and U.S.
Every time we get good news jobs announcements (donegal last few days), it’s like the gov know what’s coming and are making some half hearted attempt to lessen the impact of the bad news that’s gonna soon follow.
We don’t have a Government
Oops. I forgot, amid all the chaos ensuing without our “great” ones!
The thing about semiconductor manufacture is that it depends on so much plant. The cleanrooms and facilities are a big investment in themselves. The plant tends.to gol on to the jobs.
Now if Intel was a public service company rather than a private company………..
or an ex semi-state like telecom/eircom/eir…….
…computers would all be running on AMD chips?
For about twenty minutes on the third Tuesday in March!
First off any job loss is unfortunate and hopefully the number impacted in Ireland is relatively low. If they are, i hope they get a whopping redundancy package to compensate.
But this is the reality with any multinational based in Ireland this is a corporation not a public service entity, or a zombie bank with vested interests in keeping it alive. Its a profit making publicly trading company and is realigning its operations to best service its long term interests and strategy. read the press release – https://newsroom.intel.com/news-releases/news-release-intel-announces-restructuring/
Hopefully the operations in Ireland are more aligned with the long term strategy, i would believe they are given the huge investment recently announced. Ultimately a small business can decide to make similar changes or cuts to survive and this happens every day, while others are growing, With corporations its magnified as the numbers are much bigger. In a healthy functioning economy the losses are outweighed by the gains and overtime the jobs lost are replaced by different jobs, possibly higher skilled jobs.
Its up to us to recognize the opportunities and future education needs so we are best placed to capitalize going forward. I think there is a lot more we should be doing in that regard in developing a long term strategy as a country rather than fighting over petrol pump politics. The real world is constantly changing and moving forward and we need to evolve with it. There is no such thing as a job for life in the private sector, companies can come and go but you can build a career and profession but this can span multiple companies. Just make sure you are building a decent pension and make good financial choices for the long term.
Leixlip makes the tech which BK was talking about server/data centre products and IoT the products rolling out of Ireland are the best in class proven (source. I work there) there will be cuts but more than likely people away from the production aspect… Non ‘value added’ people I.e . SoC products are the big sellers (which are designed here) are why they chose Ireland as the main production hub for Europe. Consistently outperforming US manufacturing on cost, productivity and quality can only be a good thing.
And some people scoffed at the idea of nationalising DELL etc. Jobs went anyway. Here we go again. Thanks for the exploitation capitalism. Hope you made a good profit on our backs.
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