A Different View with Dave O’Connell

There’s a very popular pub in Salthill called the Office and there’s also at least one other – that I know of – with the same name, the heart of Cork city.

Both are fine pubs aesthetically, but their real beauty is what hangs over the door…their name. That’s because if you unexpectedly get a call summoning you home, you can honestly say you’re stuck in the Office – and you can truthfully add that you plan to be there for several hours yet.

The other great excuse, if someone is looking for you at work, is to get word out to them that you’re away all day on a course.

Not that you’re learning a new skill, unless it’s how to chip out of the bunker – because the course is of the golf variety. And yet you’re telling no lie when you say you’re away on a course.

The former Irish soccer international Stephen Ireland could have done with someone to come up with better excuses for him all those years ago, when he wanted to wriggle out of playing for his country so he could visit his girlfriend instead.

Not alone did he tell his country that his granny was dead, he then told his Manchester City club manager Sven-Goran Eriksson that he wouldn’t be able to play for them either because he was still grieving and had to help with the funeral arrangements.

All of this came as a surprise to one Patricia Tallon, who was shocked to read of her demise – because she was very much alive and kicking.

So, having been rumbled on the lie that his mother’s mother was gone to her reward, he then switched to his paternal grandmother, Brenda Kitchener.

When Brenda learned of her ‘demise’, she wasn’t just raging – she threatened to sue a newspaper for libel.

But Stephen had a shovel and he kept digging; this time he claimed that in fact it was the elderly partner of one of his grandfathers – divorced from his grandmother – who had died.

Needless to say, she too was very much overground.