Irish Economics And The Ultimate Pisstake

The English take great delight in telling Irish jokes. We don’t even bother to retaliate as soft targets aren’t much fun and anyway we kinda like them. Some suggest it’s something to do with the Stockholm syndrome but I’m sitting on the fence on that one as I don’t know what that is. Anyway, we know we’re way smarter than they are. For example, we don’t think we’re going to win a World Cup every four years. Or consider Ibiza the dog’s bollocks as a holiday destination. Or have a Prince Philip embarrassing us. Though to be fair he’s great craic if you like that sort of thing. Having said that, every now and again something happens that’d make you wonder if they have a point. Recently, there was a super satellite for the Irish Open in a city I’m not allowed to mention. Rhymes with York. When the dust settled, there were five seats worth 1150 and a sixth place prize of 1000 and six happy campers remaining. Then, it all went off. They played it out and finally knocked out a guy in sixth. Fair enough. Then, one of the guys who’d won a seat sold it for 700. If you can figure that one out you have my sympathy.

Alcohol recently gave me up but that doesn’t mean I’m not involved in the craic at the bar. At about 9 am one morning during the Norwegian Open in Dublin, I heard a story that I wouldn’t believe if I didn’t know the clients involved. Three lads were in a car heading for the Irish Open a few years ago with great haste as they were behind schedule for getting three or four pints of the black ones in before commencing hostilities. Perfectly understandable. They were stopped by the police who were themselves not playing the tournament, which was a little unfortunate or otherwise they’d have given them a police escort, and more than likely phoned ahead and got the beer organised. They were a little upset when the driver couldn’t produce a licence or ID of any sort and were ridiculously unreasonable in my opinion when they refused to accept a personalised number plate as solid proof of identity. It makes you wonder what state the country would be in if we all indulged in such petty nitpicking. They were about to arrest the driver and take him off to the police station when he dived under the seat and came up with a bag. The bag contained a bottle (full) used for containing medical urine samples and had a sticker on it with his name on it. He proudly offered this to the poor cop as irrefutable evidence that he was indeed who he claimed to be. The cop, rather superfluously in my opinion, informed his partner that he’d never in his life heard anything so fucking ridiculous and told the guys to fuck off quick before he changed his mind. They did.