“I go to the shopping centre on the weekend, like most normal people.  I try my best with my budget, to fill it out and get what I need.”

I don’t really post much on this part of the blog these days.  Truth is, I haven’t the stomach for it anymore; and people like the ghastly Catherine Byrne – one of Fine Gael’s more spectacularly arrogant and self-centred creatures, which is really saying something – are the reason.

After all, Catherine may be  truly self-centred to an appalling degree, but sadly she is also totally un-self-aware.  Otherwise, she wouldn’t come out with truly hilarious statements like that one.

She doesn’t mention that the budget that she is struggling on is €90,000 a year.  Now, there’s a figure that I could have a very pleasant struggle with indeed.

In fairness, though, it’s not as if she is really saying that she’s normal. She is saying that she is ‘like’ normal.   As in: “Once a week I put on the mask and pretend for a short while as I walk around the shopping centre that I’m just like you suckers.”

Of course, there’s another reason for her weekly jaunt to her shopping centre – and how they must love to see Catherine coming in the door, shopping trolley and notepad at the ready – and that is to do a bit of spying on her neighbours.  For, you see, Catherine is what we used to call an interfering, nosy old biddy.

I’ll come back to Catherine’s sordid snooping ways in a minute, though.  She went on:

“And I put extra things in my trolley for my children, who are all in negative equity, like many other parents out there…”

This was all through Catherine giving a lecture to ‘normal’ people on how they should regard paying more than once for water charges as a privilege rather than just another piled-on hardship. It was a Dail ‘debate’ (if you can call any of the guff they come out with by that word) on the Civil Debt (Procedures) Bill 2015 which, as we all know by now, is designed to allow our rats to deduct water bills from source in order to speed up the process of privatization.

Catherine at the Squinting Windows

After all, a lot of people have been paid off in order to facilitate that; and the people who bought them are becoming impatient for some results.  There was never supposed to be all these demonstrations and lack of people registering.  That wasn’t part of the deal.

Thankfully, Catherine and her family have no doubts about what to do.  She almost had me in tears when she spoke about her poor auld pensioner sister:

“At the end of the day, she said to me: ‘Well, if all it’s going to cost me is €60 for the year; well, that is €1.50 in the week”.

No doubt her poor voice cracked and trembled as she said it, fighting back emotion as she thought of all those selfish people who would rather have a ‘luxury’ like a night at the cinema or a glass of wine than pay yet another tax.

I can just see Catherine putting her arm around her noble sister’s shoulders to comfort her.

They are some family, the whole lot of them.

Obviously ‘the kids’ have no problem with her embarrassing them by telling us that they are freeloading off her – and by extension, us—as she uses her ridiculous wages to fill her trolley up with goodies for them because ‘they’re in negative equity’.  

You can’t embarrass spongers like them.  That only happens with normal people.

As to her snooping:

“I see people stacking their trolleys with drink and wine, and I can guarantee you, some of them shouldn’t be stacking up their trolleys with drink and wine.”

God, how would you like to live on the same road as this cosseted, overpaid old bat?  Talk about the Nosy Neighbour from Hell.

Still, she’s given us the crux of it, hasn’t she?  They really don’t want you to have any money left over for ‘luxuries’.  They want it all.

Watch out for Catherine next time you’re in  the shopping centre.  And make sure to go over and have a right good poke through what she’s buying.

Let’s see how she likes it.