How Mams Made Cork The Least Covidy County in Ireland

12th Mar 2021

“LOOK! If you think for wan second, Darren. WAN SECOND! That you’re going down to Sully’s house and half of Cork inside there, you’ve another thing coming to you, boy. It’s like a Chinese wet market up there from what I heard from Liz McCarthy in the shop the other day.

I don’t care what you saw about parties up in Dublin or Limerick on Tickergram or Tinderbook or any other of those things you’d be looking at on that bloody phone. And you’re half quare from the thing anyway. This is Cork. Get it into your head: WE ARE NOT having covid coming into this house.

No. No. NO! You’re NOT going up there.

Don’t mind saying you’ll be careful and that ye’ll be keeping the windows open! Windows open, how are ya. With the music ye’d be listening to ‘Boom, boom, boom’ all day long - it’s the same stupid thing over and over again. I dunno how ye even talk to each other with it up so loud – sure ye are probably just texting each other across the room.   

Anyway, I’d say poor Mrs. Sheehan next door is praying for Sully and his music. No wonder people are saying she’s gone mad on the drink over the lockdown. Which reminds me I must call up to her with a bunch of flowers for poor Finbarr’s anniversary too, God be good to him.

I tell ya something for nothing now, if Finbarr Sheehan was still alive and Sully was having one of his so-called ‘parties’, and the country in the middle of a pandemic, I’m telling you, he’d go in through the windows and come down on ye like a ton of bricks. His poor widow is a saint for putting up with Sully. If his mother knew what he was up to when she’s out working, she’d take his head off.

Now love I’m trying to do Sally’s plaits here, make the dinners for next week, I have to text Rory’s teacher about his missing Céim ar Chéim book, and finish a report for work on the laptop and YOU are coming into me with the puppy face about all the lads below in Sully’s place and poor you here with nothing to do.

Awwwww, poor little Darren, call the child protection service for the little soul. He’s bored of all the computers and the phones and the SNOOKER tables and the hurling, basketball, football, frizbie, the drone, the magic set, the keyboard, the ukulele and the other half a million things you own that children in Africa would give both their eyes for!!

Look at cha, you’d swear butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth and the big pretend-innocent head up on you.

Didn’t you get a pool table from Santy?….yeah I know, you know about Santy, shhhh….don’t interrupt me when I’m speaking please, love.  You got a pool table….ALRIGHT! a S-N-O-O-K-E-R table, sorry, don’t interrupt me, I said!

Why don’t you play with that or go out with your hurley and practice your weak side like Patrick Horgan said in that video you never stop watching on your phone?

See, Darren, I know you, right, if I let you go up to Sully’s place, you’ll be up there jagging Stephanie Murphy one minute and shifting Juliet from Mount Pleasant the next. ALRIGHT LOVE it’s, “JULIE”, sure it’s the same name!

I already said three times, don’t interrupt me please, love, I’m trying to do fourteen things at the same time here.

Hang on a second there, someone’s after sending me a text….Mr. Lynch is saying he sent the book home in Rory’s school bag. He’s on the drink again I’d say, I’ll text that clown back in a second when I’m finished with the one looking at me here:

ANYWAY, what was I saying? Yeah, you’ll be up there playing tongue tennis one of them, and Stephanie’s mother working above in the hospital and Juliet’s grandfather living with them. Do you know what age that man is?

Don’t be smart with me, Darren, he’s not ‘about a hundred and fifty’, he’s EIGHTY-SIX years of age and he has only one lung.

If that poor man catches covid from his granddaughter who caught it from you shoving your tongue down her throat, are you going to stand outside the funeral home and look Juliet’s mother in the eye knowing full well that they know you gave the covid to Julie when I let you up to a party in Sully’s place?

You are in your arse, Darren. It’ll be left up to me to go up there and apologise. You can make your mind easy about it, there’s no covid coming into this house or any other house we have anything to do with.

That’s it until the lockdown is over. Now, get over it.”