Murder and the Late Late Show

I used to be very friendly with a man called Bartle Fogarty who used to drink in Magowan's until he had to move to the Southside. The reason he had to go was on doctor's orders, for the good of his wife's health.

Everyone: adult, child and dog in the street knew Eileen Fogarty. She used to get on the buses going through the Daymo and do the air stewardess's talk about the emergency exits and 'in the event of a sudden decompression an individual oxygen mask ...'

She had the Guards worn out investigating murders that she would confess to. The closest they ever came to finding a body was a spider that had been bludgeoned to death with a large flat implement, possibly a shoe.

At mass on a Sunday, instead of sleeping through Fr Collins' sermons like a good Catholic, she would stand up and tell him where he was going wrong. He threw her out of confession once after she spent an hour confessing to all her murders, and asking forgiveness for bad-mouthing the Late Late Show. As he led her out of the church, he said: 'Listen to me Mrs Fogarty. I'm telling you that that's not a sin.  The whole country bad-mouths the Late Late Show. It's what it's there for. Now like a good woman will you go, and don't come back to me until you've done something terrible.'

The final straw for poor oul Bartle was when she started her daily swims in the nip in the canal. By the third day, she had hundreds of on-lookers, and the traffic was grid-locked for miles around.

Dr Lawlor told Bartle that the problem was her environment. He said that there was too much stimulation for Eileen in the Daymo, and that the best thing to do was to move to somewhere quieter. Bartle didn't want to go, but he had to make the sacrifice. He originally came from some place on the Southside near Terenure, and he decided to go back there. And off they went.

Poor Eileen died within a month from sheer boredom.

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