The new RTE comedy series Val Falvey TD is co-written by a close personal friend of mine, Arthur Mathews. So I should declare my ethical position in matters of this nature.

It goes something like this: If the show is very good, it would be morally wrong for me not to point this out, because then the writer in question would be the victim of a grave injustice, denied due recognition in a national newspaper for no good reason apart from his relationship with me.

And if the show is terrible, I will simply pretend that it doesn't exist.

As you may already have gathered, Val Falvey falls into the former category, and is entitled to all the recognition it will be getting, now and into the future, perhaps for TV eternity.

For all we know, they will still be showing Falvey every night on RTE2 in 15 years time, like they show Mathews' Father Ted. And it can be compared to Ted, not just for the involvement of Mathews and Ardal O'Hanlon, but in the sense that in many ways it is a celebration of eejitry -- every character in this series has unique characteristics, but they are all united by one thing -- they are all eejits.

And Mathews, along with co-writer Paul Woodfull, is chronicling the lives of these eejits so faithfully, it is now perhaps time that our national universities took notice, and printed up an honorary doctorate for services to eejitry and for a lifetime of achievement in this field.

There are also huge contributions from Ardal O'Hanlon as Val Falvey himself and Owen Roe as his handler -- never for a moment does the mask slip, to reveal anything but the most overwhelming levels of total and irreversible gombeenism, or, to give it its true name, eejitry.

And lo, in the same week we hail the arrival of The Savage Eye, another major study of Ireland's eejit population. This was conducted by David McSavage and his team, concentrating in the first episode on Ireland's extraordinary record of artistic accomplishment.

Because wherever there is a poet, or a playwright, there is almost certainly something of an eejit who is either buried within, or already out there.

McSavage is a dangerous man who makes most Irish funnymen look like mere corporate entertainers, and here he is endlessly inventive. There is no situation from which he fails to squeeze a laugh, either with a low-key line about Haughey giving artists the tax breaks that he himself had, or an admirable portrayal of the President, or an outbreak of physical comedy which we might otherwise describe as... well... acting the eejit.

Of course this comedy thing must look very easy to the great and the good. They have had a glorious few weeks of self-styled comedy, courtesy of Jedward.

You'd see them on the Vincent Browne show getting a big laugh merely by putting the word Jedward into a sentence -- any sentence -- and putting it out there.

"Jedward should be running the country," is a typical example. And they would say this, and they'd get their big laugh, and you could imagine them thinking that it's really very easy to get laughs -- Woody Allen, and all those guys, for all those years, weren't actually very bright or witty or insightful. All they had to do, is just stick a funny word like Jedward into anything they were saying, and everyone burst out laughing.

So that's how it's done.

You don't need to be able to do uncannily accurate impersonations, like The Emergency on their new CD, you just need to roll up to the studios of RTE and take your usual position on Saturday View and say "Jedward should be running the banks", and then bask in the warm laughter of your fellow practitioners.

Ah it's so easy, the comedy.

Mick Wallace, the builder, didn't seem to be joking on the Late Late when he said that Fianna Fail runs the country like the mafia. Which was an extraordinarily interesting thing for a well-known builder who is down about €40m to be saying, and yet no-one has bothered to ask him to elaborate on this.

He said that when he was starting out, a wily builder told him to do three things -- to get his hair cut, to get a suit, and to join Fianna Fail. Which has an element of comedy but which is also a perfectly serious survival guide in that line of work.

Wallace didn't do any of these things.

And he is also odd in being a lover of association football, rather than gaelic or rugby or the horses.

So there he was telling us that FF runs the country like the mafia and getting little reaction, whereas the wily builder would have said they run it like Jedward, and brought the house down.

- Declan Lynch

Sunday Independent