April Fool's gags do the rounds

There's an April Fool's booby-trap somewhere on these pages and it's not the piece about Justin Bieber's hair being auctioned for charity in The Ticket.

I pushed the Bieber tale through the Google machine and it checks out. As to the real prank story, I’m sworn to secrecy.

It remains to be seen just what affect the endless slew of bad bank headlines has had on our collective credulity. Safe to say, the border between plausible and far-fetched is not where it used to be.

RTÉ’s offering this year on the Dáil bar being turned into an alcohol-free juice and smoothie emporium, published on the website this morning, was undermined somewhat by the story's url which contained the words ‘aprilfool’.

However, Ryanair's pledge to introduce child-free flights on major routes from October convinced more than few readers in US, who wholeheartedly welcomed the plan. One disgruntled gent on the US Today website posted: "All airlines should offer child-free flights. If you have ever flown for six hours with some brat kicking the back of your seat the whole way, then you would agree."

Perhaps, the most mysterious stunt of the day, if it can be called a stunt, was former Green Party TD Paul Gogarty's musical debut on RTÉ's John Murray Show.

Revealing he’d just signed a record deal with Mad Dog Records, Gogarty spoke of his long-time love of music and how he used to serenade Spanish students on the green in Lucan in the 1980s, before singing and whistling his way through a song called "One Clear Day".  He later confirmed on Twitter it was a prank. That said, it's impossible to believe the bit about Lucan green wasn't true.

There was a also press release doing the rounds this morning suggesting Laois and Offaly County Councils’ had passed a motion to officially revert to their historical names of King's County and Queen’s County for the duration of Queen’s visit to Ireland in May.

Across the water in the UK, the upcoming royal wedding was the subject a several April Fool's gags.

On a half-page advertisement in the Guardian newspaper, carmaker BMW referred all queries about its special Royal Edition M3 Coupe to pauline.yorlegg@bmw.co.uk.

The Guardian also ran an editorial on its website entitled "The magic of the monarchy: The royal moment has come", heralding a change of policy on the royals and pledging its "full-throated" support for the monarchy.

The London  Independent ran a story suggesting Portuguese soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo had agreed to "act like a patriot" and be sold to neighbouring Spain for €160 million to help pay for his country's mounting bank debt.