Cavan man Marty McDermott returned to Cavan today after been left reeling by the tipping and service charge culture in Dublin.
Many of Murty’s friends and neighbours had gathered in O’Briens Pub in Cavan, to hear about Murty’s experiences after winning the first prize in the local parish yearly draw — namely, an overnight stay in a B&B in Dublin.
“Never again!” Murty told his audience. “That’s the last Dublin will see of me, I’m telling you straight the whole town is a sham, a town full of robbers it is.”
Murty regaled his listeners — many of whom had never set foot outside Lisnesairn — with stories of how he was thrice robbed.
“Well it started as soon as I set foot off the bus, I needed to pee, you see, I’d brought a flask of tea and a few bits of ham which were leftover from the weekend for to eat on the bus. Anyway, twenty cents it cost me to use a toilet in one of them shopping centre places. Twenty cents shur there’s no sense in that.”
Not the End of It
“That wasn’t the end of it,” Murty continued to his enthralled audience. “They wanted to charge me one euro sixty cents for the five-mile DART trip down the road to the B&B. ‘Feck that,’ says I and set off walking even though ”’twas raining heavy at the time — but good money hard-earned is not for wasting.”
At this stage, Murty’s listeners were shocked at his story. Honestly, you could have heard a pin drop as they shared two pints between the six of them!
“But there’s worse to come,” said Murty as he looked around for a decent cigarette butt in the ashtrays. Eventually finding one he scrounged a match from his cousin after promising to repay him later, he lit up.
A Fist Full of Sausages
“‘Twas like this,” he continued. “On the Sunday morning I had the breakfast in the B&B — wasn’t bad to be fair but I had to ask for a few more sausages — anyway but at about three in the afternoon I had an awful hunger. I suppose ”’twas all the excitement.”
“So off I goes to get a sandwich and a cup of tea for myself before catching the bus home. Ten euro they wanted for one cup of tea and a ham sandwich.
“Shur, I had to pay it — no choice at all in the matter. But Be-Jaysus when I got the bill they’d stuck on a thing called a service charge. Never heard the like of it in me life.” He said.
“Shur, I had to pay it, especially after I got them to fill the flask with hot water and lobbed in the used teabag. But I’m telling you win or no win next year I’m not entering that parish draw. It cost me a fortune it did.”
The Aftermath
Meanwhile in Ireland News have subsequently learnt that the Dublin trip was not a total disaster for Murty; It appears that Murty used the overnight stay to relieve the B&B of fifteen rolls of toilet paper, twenty-seven kilos of sugar, two dozen sachets of tomato ketchup and various bits and bobs of cutlery.