Fruitcakes rule OK

The number of crazies in the Democratic Unionist Party (now the lead party in the government of Northern Ireland) continues to amaze. After the First Minister’s wife’s outbursts against homosexuality, we now have this:

A SENIOR DUP Assemblyman has pressed for creationism to be taught alongside evolution in classrooms across the North.

Mervyn Storey, who chairs the Stormont education committee, said his “ideal” would be the removal of evolutionary teaching from the curriculum altogether.

“This is not about removing anything from the classroom, although that would probably be the ideal for me, but this is about us having equality of access to other views as to how the world came into existence and that I think is a very, very important issue for many parents in Northern Ireland.”

He also has a problem with geology, specifically the age of the Giant’s Causeway in County Antrim.

Mr Storey, among others, has called for the proposed visitors’ centre to display not just accepted geological data, but also the creationist argument that the distinctive rock formation is only 6,000 years old. “The problem to date has been that we only have a narrow interpretation from an evolutionary point of view as to how these particular stones were formed,” he said last year.