Youse have five minutes til have your perceptions challenged!

Former Loyalist paramilitary and class A nutter Michael Stone has defended his recent one-man attack on the Northern Ireland Parliament with handgun and bomb-in-a-bag as not the actions of a deranged extremist, but as... 'performance art.'

Said Stone's defense lawyer, Arthur Harvey, QC: "My instructions are that these were not viable explosive devices and were improvised from the most basic household items, including a cardboard holder for a kitchen roll, candle wax and powder from fireworks freely available in shops."

"It was, in fact, a piece of performance art replicating a terrorist attack," Harvey added, with a straight face, we hope.

In an open letter to the Northern Ireland Secretary of State Peter Hain and the Chief Constable Sir Hugh Orde, Stone referred to himself as "an author and artist" and alleged that his "unfinished work", entitled 'Never Say Never', was aimed at exposing the "futility of the politically-motivated violence created in a political vacuum."

Ah yes. Incredible brushwork, such exquisite appearance of a loss of control at the edges. Stone also said that Picasso's Guernica had inspired his piece and he signed off his letter with words that must have made Hain and Orde pause abruptly — "political conflict is a crossroads for art, the art transcends politics" — before roaring with laughter.

Think about these words: "Political conflict is a crossroads for art, the art transcends politics."

Or, as another put it:

The same arts that did gain
A power, must it maintain.

My friends, we will ponder Stone's words for years to come. Could this mean that Bobby Sands was not on hunger strike but merely offering a commentary on the overbearing bourgeois obsession with food and eating? Or that the Enniskillen Memorial Day bombers were simply joining with local Protestants in presenting a vivid avant-garde reprise of the horrors of war? What if indeed, the entire Troubles were simply an elaborate piece of modern theater? Wake me up when all has been revealed but after everyone has forgotten...

[Photo above shows Michael Stone and his unwilling fellow performance artists, Mr and Mrs. Stormont Security-Guard of Government Subsidy Gardens, West-South-West Belfast.]