'Star Trek' Meaney attempts valiantly to beam McGuinness on board

NEWTON'S OPTIC:'WHY WOULD people be surprised in me having this event in my name, I don't see why, I don't see why."

So said actor Colm Meaney after hosting a rally for Martin McGuinness, and quite right too, for he is the ideal celebrity to endorse any Sinn Féin-linked candidate.

Mr Meaney is best known as transporter chief Miles O'Brien in Star Trek: the Next Generation. Casual viewers might have thought this was a relatively minor role.

However, as all real science fiction fans know, no piece of Star Trek technology raises more profound philosophical questions.

The transporter works by breaking people down, atom by atom, and transmitting this information to another machine for reassembly.

The question is whether the reassembled person is the same individual or a copy. In other words, does the transporter actually move you on or does it just kill you?

Supporters of the transporter process would no doubt say it both moves you on and kills you, and this could be justified if the journey was sufficiently important.

The American physicist Lawrence Krauss proposes a thought experiment to clarify the matter.

Suppose you get into the transporter, Chief O’Brien throws a switch and nothing seems to happen.

“Don’t worry,” Chief O’Brien says. “It did work and you’ve arrived at your destination. You just weren’t disassembled here. But you’ve received a lethal dose of radiation so everything will be fine if we just wait a bit then pretend this never happened.”

I think we can all agree that there is plenty here for Mr Meaney to discuss at his next Sinn Féin rally.

In Star Trek: the Next Generation, the transporter occasionally malfunctioned, forcing Chief O'Brien to employ ingenious technical fixes.

These usually involved keeping disassembled people in “the buffer” by connecting the outputs to the inputs, letting their information go around and around while hoping their “patterns” would not “degrade”.

If anyone has come up with a better definition of a truth commission, I have certainly yet to hear it.

Mr Meaney's other best-known role is even more appropriate for a Sinn Féin supporter. In Die Hard 2, he played an English-accented pilot for "Windsor Air", tragically crashing his plane with the loss of all on board after terrorists hacked into the air traffic control system.

Has there ever been a more poignant illustration of how forcing Irish people to adopt English ways and fly the Windsor flag will inevitably lead to casualties?

Of course, if Mr Meaney feels neither of these roles provide suitable material for the election trail, he can always fall back on his 1998 appearance in The Magical Legend of the Leprechauns.

It is not just Sinn Féin that can benefit from Mr Meaney’s political insight.

After Star Trek: the Next Generationfinished, he played the same Miles O'Brien character in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

This was set on a space station orbiting the planet Bajor, which had liberated itself from the evil Cardassian Empire, only to find it now depended for its economic survival on a nearby wormhole that kept threatening to let in an even worse empire or just collapse altogether.

Clearly, we need to hear Mr Meaney’s views on the euro.