Hope was last seen in Doonbeg

Hope, a five-foot tall bear, has been missing since the thirteenth of September. This week, an anonymous supporter bought the charity Make-A-Wish a replacement. Kind, obviously. It's also the thing you do once you've stopped hoping.

The bear had been with the charity for around 15 years, a long career for a mascot and longer than most of our government ministers get. Its work was the work of every big soft bear at a public event, being hugged by children and photographed beside men who'd rather be at the bar. The last verified sighting was at about seven o'clock on a Sunday evening at the Irish Open golf tournament. The venue was the Trump International Golf Links and Hotel, Doonbeg.

You couldn't put it in a satirical paragraph. Any editor worth paying, mine included, would send it back in a return email and ask for a revision. Too much, Conor, pull it back, we have a reputation to uphold! A bear called Hope vanishes off Donald Trump's golf course in the run-up to an American election, and in the end it's left to a private citizen to replace it on the quiet. Fiction would lay that on with a trowel. Real life uses a JCB and doesn't apologise.

How do you steal a five-foot bear?

Not under your jumper. Five feet is the height of a smallish adult, and a bear that size is an armful with the weight distribution of a drunk staggering home at midnight. You'd want the back seats of an estate folded flat, and you'd have to get it across a car park full of stewards and whatever security a Trump property runs to, which I'd imagine is considerable. 

Seven on a Sunday evening, at the tail end of a tournament, is the softest hour there is. The light going. Crowds trudging to their cars with the glazed look of people who've watched golf since breakfast. That's when I'd move, if I were in the bear kidnapping business.

Doonbeg, remember, is the place that went to the planners a few years back for a wall to keep the Atlantic off its dunes. It takes its perimeter seriously. The ocean was judged a threat worth engineering against, and yet a five-foot bear appears to have left the premises on a September evening without anyone lifting an eyebrow. I'm not alleging negligence. My guess is that if security was watching anything that night, it was the sea, which has been trying to get onto that course for years and has never once taken a break for a few pints in the hotel bar.

No, I don't think it was a professional job. I think it was a drink-fuelled lark.

Anyone who has lived in the west knows the evening. A big day out, a hotel bar, and at roughly the sixth pint a gang of perfectly respectable men, an accountant and a dentist from Limerick among them, decides that bringing the bear home would be the funniest thing ever done in the history of Clare. It never is. Someone will have taken a photograph, someone always does, and it's the idea of the photograph that keeps the bear in hiding. By Monday morning it's a five-foot problem standing in a hall while a wife looks at it, then at her husband, and says nothing at all.

Now the bear, enlivened by its newfound notoriety, can't just go back, and that's where it turns farcically Irish. A note pinned to its chest and deposited at the gates of Doonbeg is out of the question. So is ringing the charity with the relevant details. Each day it remains missing makes the return all the harder, like a borrowed lawnmower that becomes yours through the sheer weight of embarrassment. 

Hope goes into the garage first. Later the attic, until the attic starts to leak, and after that the spare room, and I'd put money on it ending up in a shed on a cousin's land, among the bales and a quad bike with a flat battery, staring at the bare walls and waiting out the statute of limitations on shame. In this country that runs to about forty years, or the death of whichever mother would find out.

I've no evidence for a word of this. Nor has anyone else, which is rather the point. The bear disappeared from one of the most photographed stretches of coast in the country on a day when thousands of people were walking about with phones in their hands, and seven weeks on it hasn't surfaced. Not in a ditch, not on Done Deal. Nobody has even had the manners to prop it outside a pub in Kilkee in a county jersey, which is the least you'd expect.

Make-A-Wish exists to bring joy to children who are very sick or terminally ill. A big soft bear at a golf tournament is how a charity like that catches the eye of people with money to spare, so Hope was a working animal and earned its keep. Whoever took it didn't just take a cuddly toy. They took 15 years of hard-won goodwill and the memory behind photographs of children who survived or did not, perched on mantelpieces all over the country. The intended joke stopped being funny somewhere around the Ennis bypass.

I instinctively like the new bear's anonymous buyer a great deal, and I'm wary of how much. In Ireland, the purest charity is the kind that won't give its name. The second purest is guilt. It wouldn't be the first time a man paid for a new one sooner than own up to the old, then told the house the cheque was for the children. Which, in fairness to him, it was.

Spare a thought for the understudy as it walks into the job, the way a second wife walks into a church, met with suspicion and comparisons on its first outing. Children hugging it will be measuring it against a memory, and the volunteers will say it's grand, sure it's nearly the same, in the voice we keep for a new recruit fumbling over basic tasks. It probably won't put a paw wrong and will never be forgiven for not being the original well-worn bear. It will spend its working life at golf classics, charity events, and fundraisers, waving and smiling at strangers, while its predecessor out west sits in the half-dark of a shed. Not dead. Just away, which is the most Irish way there is to leave.

Last Tuesday, America voted in the midterms, and the commentators have no doubt spent the week since asking where hope went. I can't help with the big ideological version that went missing long before the cuddly bear. The bear version was last seen at Doonbeg around seven on a Sunday, and somebody in Clare knows exactly where it is and always has. Tonight, I'd imagine, they're lying awake in the dark, thinking about moving it from the shed.