Here's a few stories that appeared in Irish newspapers last week.
Anger as taxi driver claims Siamese twins count as two passengers not one
Monday, 12 March 2007
“That’s two people not one, that’ll put me over the legal passenger limit!” was the explanation given by a Galway taxi driver last week after he refused to accept a fare to carry three family members and their twins in his cab.
His decision to think of the conjoined twins as two people instead of one meant that the family numbered five, not four - which is the maximum number of people legally allowed to travel in a cab of this type.
The twin’s father Eric Bronson was forced to leave his twins and walk home in the rain, as his wife Elizabeth, his eldest son Steve, and his Siamese twins Mike and Michael were the four to ride in the cab.
Legally cabs are only allowed to carry four people, however the statute books aren’t 100 per cent clear when it comes to the difficult issue of conjoined twins. Some cabbies count twins of this nature as one person, while some take them as two.
Last night, the taxi driver involved, Eddie Bullard, spoke out about the incident. “They had two heads so I counted them as two people,” he said. “I count passengers the old fashioned way - by their heads. And with them two in here along with their parents and other brother, that was five heads in my cab and I can’t carry that many heads. If I’d have been stopped by the gardaí (Irish Police), I could well have lost my licence.”
However another taxi driver we spoke to disagreed. He said, “That counting by heads thing is very old school you know. But things are different these days. I personally like to count torsos and if Eddie had done that this whole issue could have been avoided.”
But the common sense of cabbies won’t be enough as taxi bosses have this week called on the Government to clarify whether conjoined twins count as one or two people in cabs. The Dáil (government over here) is due to discuss the issue today, as Fianna Fáil (a political party in ireland) believes it can be a real vote winner come the next election
Disgruntled charity mugger mugs four
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Monday, 12 March 2007
Sick of spending her days being ignored by passers-by, a ‘charity mugger’ snapped last week and took charity into her own hands by holding four people at knife point before demanding the contents of their wallets for an African charity in a laneway off Galway’s busiest street.
The slang title ‘charity mugger’ or ‘chugger’, which is routinely applied to street fundraisers was never expected to take on such a chilling reality when it first entered the English language in the late nineties.
On Friday last at around 3pm, the woman, who is in her mid 20s, was standing in Shop Street with her colleagues, wearing a bright red jacket and a cheery face while trying to convince people to hand over their bank account details to charity. Her day, though, was not going well and it was about to get much worse.
At around 3.30pm, she took leave of her colleagues to embark on some extracurricular fund raising. She told her colleagues she was going to get a coffee, but entered a quiet laneway off the bustling Shop Street where she stood, waiting.
Soon afterwards, a man in his 30s entered the laneway and tried to ignore the woman. Seeing the man was trying to escape, she reached into her pocket and took out a newly sharpened breadknife and called at the man. He turned around and was pinned to the wall before he gave up his €100 in cash and his credit card details.
Two women, one elderly, and a male student hockey player were also overpowered by the street fundraiser before she was apprehended by gardaí and taken to Mill Street Gardaí Station. In total she had obtained four credit cards and more than €250 in cash in her hour long mugging spree.
The woman, however has refused to disclose the whereabouts of the money, which she hid before gardaí pounced. “That much money,” she told detectives, “could be used to buy 14 airports and a fleet of sheep in Africa. I’m not giving it up.”
She was charged by gardaí under the recently introduced ‘Taking The Slang Version of Job Title Too Seriously Act’. A file has been sent to the DPP and the woman is due to go back on the streets later today.
Man suffocated to death after inhaling women’s knickers
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Monday, 12 March 2007
The Galwayman who died following an incident in a women’s underwear shop last year lost consciousness and slipped into a coma because he suffocated himself with women’s panties, the Coroner’s Court was told last night.
Mr Michael Dragabra passed away in UCHG last month after suffering injuries following a bizzare happening in the Galway women’s underwear shop last summer.
The incident led to weeks of wild media speculation as why a man was left in a crippling coma. However yesterday, the case was finally heard in the Coroner’s Court and ‘death by accidental self-suffocation by knickers’ was revealed as the reason behind the tragedy.
The court heard that Mr Dragabra used to stick his nose into the shop now and then “as if he was catching a whiff,” from the Shop’s owner Ms Emily Plunge. On the day in question, she said, it was the first time any part of his body other than his nose entered the shop.
“He went towards the selection of panties down the back and picked up one or two. I approached him and asked ‘Are you Ok?’ to which he replied ‘Yes, I’m only looking’. This was rather odd but I left him be and went back to work. Although I stopped looking at him, it seems he took the underwear and headed towards the changing rooms. That’s where I discovered him 20 minutes later.”
When asked why she waited so long, Ms Plunge said, “Well, we get men coming in now and then trying on women’s underwear before buying some. It’s a market we weren’t exactly aiming for when we opened the shop but they bring in a steady income. I thought this man was one of them.”
However the man wasn’t there to buy underwear, he was just sniffing it. Ms Plunge then told how she found Mr Dragabra lying unconscious on the changing room floor with a pair of pink frilly knickers attached to his face. She tried to remove them but they were stuffed too deeply into his nose and mouth. She immediately called emergency services and Mr Dragabra was removed to UCHG where surgeons cut away the knickers.
With his air passages blocked for so long, Mr Dragabra slipped into a coma and died last month. The coroner ruled that this was an unusual case, and added that it was a quite an embarrassing way to go out.
Clamper hospitalised after clamping himself to car
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Monday, 19 March 2007
A Galway clamper who accidentally got his leg caught up in his own clamp, forcing him to call another clamping company to open the device (at a cost of €80), is recovering in hospital this week.
Mr Jimmy Locke was left red faced and €80 poorer last week after getting his leg caught up in his own clamp as he attached it to an illegally parked car in the city centre. He was nearing the end of a 12 hour shift, heavy on driving around and clamping, when he spotted the red car parked illegally in a laneway off the city centre.
Mr Locke approached the car as normal and went about attaching a clamp to the front wheel. However it was too late when he became aware that his leg was caught up in the device. As it was around 11pm, there was no one around, so Mr Locke was unable to reach the keys to unlock the clamp, which were left in his truck.
However, he had his mobile in his back pocket so contacted a rival clamping company who were soon on the scene. Mr Locke, of course, had to hand over the compulsory €80 release fee before they opened the clamp. His leg was badly mangled and he is recovering this week in UCHG
Language difficulties as court hears foreign nationals were caught demolishing sink
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Monday, 19 March 2007
By Magdalena Szulc
Two Polish nationals, Kamil Poreba, 26 and Wojciech Wroblewski, 27, with an address in east Galway were last week caught tampering with a bathroom sink. A 72-year-old neighbour, Mrs Nuala McCarthy, happened to call in to ask the boys to help her with her own bathroom appliance when she witnessed what she later described as a scene of horror.
“The fair-haired boy’s head was covered in blood as he was repeatedly banging it off the wall and the mirror, unsatisfied with not being able to detach a hot water tap from the sink.” The neighbour couldn’t believe her ears either as the worst swearwords she could ever imagine started pouring out of the other man’s mouth. “I wanted to try calm them down at first, but there was no talking to them. They didn’t even seem to notice my presence. They continued their strenuous efforts with the tap, yelling at the top of their voices in despair,” added the woman, scared out of her mind.
Kamil Poreba and Wojciech Wroblewski told the court yesterday they had planned on carrying out an action like that since they arrived in Ireland. “In our f****** country, we have a single f****** spout shared by hot and cold water supplies allowing f****** warm flows. In Ireland, faucets have a double f****** spout tap, one spout for hot, one for cold water, which means it’s either f****** hot or as f****** cold that you can freeze your f****** b**** off!,” they explained to the judge, leaving him speechless for a good minute. When asked why it was such a tremendous problem to them, the judge was told, “We’re not f****** working our f****** a**** off so that when we f****** get home, when ther’e no f****** dinner waiting on the f****** table, we go in to the f****** bathroom and we can’t even wash our f****** hands properly!”
Due to a language problem, the judge suggested a break and everyone was due to be back in the courtroom at 2pm sharp. Everyone was, apart from the defendants, who 10 minutes later were found by one of the court cleaners fiddling with the court bathroom sink. Luckily, the man arrived at the would-be crime scene in time and the two men were brought back in.
The judge fined Kamil Poreba and Wojciech Wroblewski €300 each for disruptive (and destructive) behaviour as well as additional €150 each for causing Mrs Nuala McCarthy’s mental health to deteriorate.
On top of that, a symbolic one cent is to be paid by each of the men for the use of offensive language (the amount might seem ridiculous, but in fact nobody had notified the defendants they ought not to use such a vocabulary while in the court house).
An eye witness told Galway Worst he saw both men’s index fingers crossed with their middle fingers while they were getting away with only a fine on condition that it would not ever happen again. Apparently the gesture of crossing your index and middle finger together while saying something of great importance signifies that you don’t really mean what you’re saying and in Poland, if you have a proof for that, you can get away with the worst crime.
Subject: Irish weird news stories 
Thu Mar 22, 2007 6:12 pm
