Plan to move Hong Kongers to N. Ireland revealed a hoax

HONG KONG: An apparent plan by British government officials to move Hong Kong's 5.5 million people to Northern Ireland after the handover to China has been revealed as a hoax.
The outlandish plan by Christie Davies, a professor of the sociology of morality, censorship and humour at the University of Reading, made it into the Northern Irish press in 1983.
Davies told the New York Times earlier in the week: "At the time, the piece was well received in Hong Kong, but it was recognized as humorous ... (but) the Irish do not understand satire and have no sense of humour so I guess some of them took it seriously."
The memoranda that British civil servants wrote in response to the article were recently released by Britain's National Archives, including one by junior official George Fergusson, who began discussions with the Foreign Office, according to a file titled "The Replantation of N Ireland from Hong Kong".
"At this stage we see real advantages in taking the proposals seriously," Fergusson wrote to David Snoxell, a colleague in the Republic of Ireland Department.
Snoxell's reply suggests that the two bureaucrats were treating the plan light-heartedly. He said that 5.5 million Hong Kong people arriving in Northern Ireland "may induce the indigenous peoples to forsake their homeland for a future elsewhere."
"We should not underestimate the danger of this taking the form of a mass exodus of boat refugees in the direction of South East Asia," Snoxell added.
"My mind will be boggling for the rest of the day."
Now retired, Snoxell was interviewed earlier in the week by the BBC and he said that the tone of the exchange revealed that it "was a spoof between colleagues who had a sense of humour."
The released documents were taken seriously by many news organizations. – dpa