WHAT do you get if you cross a telephone with an iron?
A smooth operator.
Ba dum tss!
Thank you very much, I’m here all week.
But seriously, did you hear about the Limerick councillor who phoned the Council’s emergency hotline and got through to Portugal?
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The councillors, there was more than one of them at it — silly pranksters, the lots of them — thought that their phones had been copulating with a skunk.
Why?
They had stinky service!
I know, I know, stick to the day job.
Still, there they all were, out in West Limerick, looking to get their constituents out of carparks that the local authority felt was great gas locking them into.
You really couldn’t be up to them.
Melodramatic Fine Gael man Adam Teskey must have been getting flashbacks to drinking Madeira wine and eating sardines with his auld pal Cristiano Ronaldo when he made an emergency call last week.
In fairness, it isn’t often that Cllr Teskey, the best panto dame this side of The Gaiety Theatre, is flabbergasted. But flabbergasted he was, or so he told the council executive at last week’s full meeting of Limerick City and County Council (LCCC).
The Adare-Rathkeale representative had to call the Council’s emergency line as neither Lassie nor Skippy were available to bail him out.
According to Teskey, a mother was stuck in her car with a four-month-old baby at the carpark of the Palatine Centre in Rathkeale, and his own cape and leggings were at the dry cleaners on the day.
When he leapt to the rescue and made that urgent call, it wasn’t some ‘wan’ sitting behind a desk down in Merchants Quay that answered his plea, but some José Mourinho lookalike on a lounger in Albufeira.
“I was flabbergasted to find out when I had to use our own emergency line the other evening that it was picked up in Portugal,” Cllr Teskey confessed coyly, as is his way.
“I made a phone call to the emergency phone line to get ‘thank you for calling Limerick City and County Council, this is such and such speaking’ and I said to him, ‘where are you based?’
“‘We’re based in Portugal’,” Limerick’s answer to Baywatch’s David Hasselhoff told council members — still absolutely horrified after the incident.
Maybe the Council should hire their very own Grizzly Adams and any time there’s a person stuck in a carpark in Rathkeale, Ben, his loyal bear can alert him to the danger so he can ride in on his faithful companion Number Seven to save the day.
I can just picture Cllr Teskey in animal skins and riding a mule. No offence, Cllr Keary.
With the council chamber now eating out of the palm of his hand, he continued his shocking tale.
“There was a person stuck in a car with a four-month-old baby at the Palatine Centre in Rathkeale, at the start of the Greenway, where we’re putting up bollards at five o’clock, and the cars that are there, can’t get out.
“I rang Portugal and they told me that they tried to ring the emergency line here and it went unanswered on five occasions. Now we are a local authority and the whole essence of a local authority is that we deal with local issues in an expedient manner.”
Won’t somebody please think of the children?
With all the huff and puff he could muster, Teskey insisted that councillors be allowed throw their Fisher Price chatter telephones out of their prams and at the very least, be allowed VTech Peek & Play phones.
“I think it’s an absolute joke that we’re ringing overseas to deal with a local issue that was only three miles down the road from my own house. I want that rectified,” he cried.
Cllr Stephen Keary (FG) and Cllr Jerome Scanlan (IND) had similar experiences.
I tell you, there must be some good yokes in their water supply.
“I got some guy in Shanghai or somewhere to answer me,” Keary claimed after an old man got stuck in the same carpark as Teskey’s damsel in distress.
“The bollards come up around five o’clock. This was around six. I was on my way to a funeral when he rang me and luckily I had a meter box key in my car and was able to open one of the bollards. We made the gap wider to get him out, but that’s not for me as a councillor to be doing.”
Ah look, it’s not all bad. Shur, doesn’t the telephone only give us the happiness of being together yet safely apart?
‘Thank feck’, says the poor lad in Portugal!
