It was a zebra, writes Victoria Gallagher-O'Houlihan

I WANT TO set the record straight about the National Acronym Conference, as sponsored by Gallagher-O’Houlihan Shipping and Frozen Orange Juice. There is no truth whatsoever in the stories about the dead okapi. At no point was an okapi present. And at no point did the assembled trendsetters, fashionistas and hipsters feel inclined to share their Cristal with wildlife using anything as inelegant as a funnel.

Many of these revellers had spent months saving carb allowances for NAC 2010; many others were far too merry to even notice the zebra – for zebra it was – in the beer garden.

There is no evidence to suggest that the zebra was harmed by second-hand smoke during the post-conference party. Nor was the ill-fated beast "locked out in the cold", at least not in the way that certain callers to Livelinehave used the phrase.

Stripes was most definitely not, as some reports have it, “callously tossed aside on a whim”. The boring old truth is that when a certain ex-personal assistant failed to secure the new panda dress from the Marc Jacobs for Louis Vuitton collection, Stripes became surplus to requirements.

As a result he was nowhere near the conference nor its sponsors at the time of his unfortunate demise.

His accidental delivery to my father’s processing plant, though tragic, is no reason to boycott daddy’s pork belly products.

There is no need to get hysterical and start calling for laws that will affect ordinary decent leopard owners trying to go about their business. I’m always amazed that the same people who love to write threatening letters about our family menagerie are happy to go around in leather shoes and mink shrugs like the rest of us.

FYI: if our panther wasn’t content then why has he been walking around in a tidy little circle since 2003? Anyway, there was a casualty at NAC 2010, but that casualty had nothing to do with a wrongly delivered zebra and even less to do with Gallagher-O’Houlihan Shipping and Frozen Orange Juice. No, last weekend, long before the Garda arrived to break up the spat between rival R-Patz and Tay Tay supporters, the corpse of justice lay pathetically sprawled across the Rosa aurora floor.

It all started with the MaBy supporters and their ridiculous insistence that we refrain from calling the Irish X Factorhopeful MayBe as this interfered with the "conceptual purity of the acronym". I mean, honestly, it's sometimes like these people have nothing to worry about.

If the rest of the evening got out of hand it’s because for us YAVIS kids that’s just not good enough. If we adopt MayBe as the official pronunciation it makes it much easier for the NINJAS below to have their little conversations. “MayBe is TY SuBo,” they’ll say, before pottering back to their desks and refineries, happy in their own sense of cultural literacy.

I like to think we were fighting for democracy. TTFN