The Big Read: Too good not to be true

You can tell a lot about a person from the things they'll believe. This week Ireland provided my favourite news story of the year.

In the town of Omagh in County Tyrone, a plumber was found to have spent 15 years painstakingly tunnelling from his bedroom to a pub 250m down the street, and was rumbled only when his sub-street-level crawl space caused a neighbour's sewerage pipe to collapse.

Inspired by watching The Shawshank Redemption on TV one night in 1994, Paddy Kerr made the tunnel in nightly increments over several years, using a dinner spoon and later a machine that he smuggled into his house when his wife was at the shops.

He finally surfaced in a storage cupboard beside the ladies' toilets, and each night at 11, while his wife slept the teetotal sleep of the just, he would wiggle his way down the block, emerge like a thirsty mole, and set about the stocks of Guinness.

Ah, good times, so they were, but he was almost relieved to be apprehended because she was always sniffing stale liquor and sewage on him in the mornings, which he had to pass off as the natural emanations of his person, and "recently I was finding myself singing rebel songs coming back up the tunnel so it was only a matter of time before I was caught".

Every week and every day some fool forwards or angrily comments on some new item of obvious untruth making its way around the internet. It doesn't matter how frequently debunked or frankly unfeasible the item may be, there's always someone clamouring to believe it.

Sometimes it's just politically inflected scaremongering or piffle and poppycock that someone's cynically trying to pass off as truth: "Nelson Mandela has been dead for a year and they're keeping it from us!" said some wingnut in Las Vegas, and that story was passed on by fruit-loops and knuckledraggers eager to believe it.

Recently, there was a fresh spate of hand-wringing about a story claiming that, as some kind of weird initiation ritual, gangsters are driving around at night with their headlights off, shooting the first person to flick their lights at them. That one was first debunked 15 years ago, when people still had to forward their hoaxes directly by e-mail.

Then there are the satirical news sites like The Onion, which so routinely fool those without reading skills that Facebook recently mooted creating a "Satire" tag. This would be the equivalent of walking around a cocktail party with a small sign saying "Joke", which you could hold up whenever you're about to crack witty. Come to think of it, remembering my last cocktail party, that's an idea I should consider.

I haven't yet fallen for a hoax or piece of satire, which I like to attribute to the fact that I don't outsource my communication to emojis, but which probably just means that most hoaxes and satires aren't aimed at my particular weaknesses. I don't by some masochistic urge tend to eagerly assume the worst about my society, or even my government, so I'm less willing to fall for something that seems so sweetly to confirm my expectations.

But there was something about the plumber and his tunnel to the pub, which was published on a satirical Irish site called tyronetribulations.com, that so viscerally delighted me that I longed for it to be real. I wasn't quite like the parade of earnest citizens leaving comments like "Why didn't he just wait till his wife was asleep then use the front door?" or the bloke who fact-checked it and uncovered the smoking gun that The Shawshank Redemption wasn't on Irish TV in 1994, but still I searched for some way it might at least have been inspired by a true story.

Judging by the similar responses of many of my friends, there's some kind of archetype involved that appeals to the yearning hearts of men of a certain age. Perhaps it's the image of a chap living a respectable life, fulfilling his day-time duties to society, but each night beavering away in moon-dusted solitude at some modest passion project, some escape from the world of expectations, some hollowed out half-acre of absorption that is his alone. For some it's building model trains, or having a pen-pal, or being Batman.

When I was young Mr Weil next door set to building a boat in his backyard. Some summer evenings my dad would take two beers over and sit silently watching him weld or shape wood, and I'd watch them over the fence. The boat was never more than a keel and some ribs, but that didn't matter. It was pointless but it was his, like a tunnel to a pub.