Radical Think-tank driven from Mongolia

By Thadeus Moriarty (Religious Affair Correspondent)

Chinese intimidation is being blamed for The Institute of Implausibility’s sudden decision to leave its Mongolian headquarters in the capital Ulaan Bataar.

Grand Wizard of the Institute Pádraig Iago; speaking from the Hotel Kazakhstan in bustling downtown Almaty yesterday told reporters that no specific allegations of foul play could be levelled against the Mongolian authorities or the Ulaan Baataar Police Department.

Downtown Ulaan Bataar yesterday

As exonerations go, this was pretty mealy-mouthed, But then Iago hinted sensationally at what he called the ‘non-Mongolian dimensions of our decision to leave at very short notice’. When pressed by reporters to elaborate, Iago would only say that ‘whoever they were, they seemed pretty sure that they had more than a terra cotta army behind them.’

When asked where he and his fifty strong secretariat would go now that their world headquarters had been abandoned, Iago shrugged his shoulders, smiled stoically and said; ‘Who knows? We’re international refugees now, we will have to review our situation but in the meantime Professor O’Lughnasa is in Europe hoping to establish at least a provisional headquarters for the Institute.

The Institute of Implausibility is one of those organisations that has successfully defied classification for the bulk of its history.

Most people agree it started with two radical Jesuit Theologians from the West Coast of Ireland back in the 1930s. They remain to this day its two Grand Wizards. Their ages are uncertain as their birth records were among those destroyed during the Black and Tan War in Ireland in the early 1920s. But however you slice and dice it, they’ve got to be at least ninety years apiece. Not a bad record of globetrotting for nonagenarians.

In the feverish days of the 1930s, while De Valera strove to create a Celtic Shangri-La and the Catholic Hierarchy was in its pomp, the rest of the world moved towards war. It was also a time when the fledgling state was still rooting out its former comrades in arms.

Iago and O’Lughnasa were apparently camp chaplains in IRA internment camps in the Curragh Kildare. And there began their conversion to a more radical doctrine – one that would now probably be described as extreme or even crypto liberation theology.

The Institute of Implausibility could be seen as radical order, an extreme left-wing Jesuit apostasy; an order of commie monks with machine guns.

They would have you believe that they are just as described in their promotional literature: a metaphysical think-tank devoted to the counter-intuitive solution. But over the years, these Arch-Catholic Ronin have run out countries where they can incorporate. Their peripheral involvement with numerous notorious liberation movements and organised crime figures has ensured that they treated Hostis Humanis Intellectualis.