Publican Is His Own Best Customer

FOR Waterford publican, Tommy Geraghty, business at The Screaming Goat bar has been slow the last couple of years, despite his accountant reporting a 34% increase volume in alcohol being sold.

“I can’t make head nor tails of it,” the 59-year-old insisted, now ordering an Eastern European staff member to pull him a pint from the bottom bar as the runoff is better there’, “we’ve gone through an extra 300 barrels of the black stuff last year, yet we’re actually down on revenue? Something is wrong, somewhere”.

Gulping into his lunchtime pint, Geraghty looked down past his nose, complete with a burst purple blood vessel, to the end of the glass, when a conclusion suddenly dawned on him.

“Someone’s fuckin’ robbing me!” he gasped, giving the barman a nod to put on another pint, “I’m going to have to get cameras over the taps and register, someone’s handing out free pints to their friends”.

“It’s so hard to get decent Irish staff these days, sure you wouldn’t know what these Polish lads were at over beyond”.

Mr. Geraghty purchased The Screaming Goat in 2002, with the business employing hundreds of non-national workers over the years, for as little as possible per hour.

“Don’t get me wrong, they’re great little workers in fairness to them now,” he added, already halfway through his second pint, “but since the wife left me in 2012, the profits have just plunged, and I guarantee you it’s one of them taking advantage of the situation and fleecing me”.

Coincidentally, the grandson of four also drinks Guinness, which, according to the books, seems to be the only beer tap affected by plungling sales, followed by hundreds of missing Powers Whiskey bottles.

“I’ll have to keep an eye on the staff now to see who’s drinking what,” Geraghty concluded, before now ordering a whiskey chaser to ‘settle the nerves’.