Man makes shit of McDowell’s driveway: oh, the humanity!

From the Irish Times via Eircom:

Michael McDowell “ranted and raved” to a drunk lorry driver that he had “made shit” of his driveway with a waste skip, a court heard yesterday. Skip lorry driver Patrick Hayes (37) claimed an angry Minister for Justice made the remark after seeing him trying to manoeuvre his vehicle in the family driveway at Charleston Road, Ranelagh, Dublin, on July 30th, 2005. Hayes, who admitted he had drunk half a bottle of vodka before going to do the skip job, was yesterday fined €800 and banned from driving for a year arising out of the incident.

I liked this bit:

Judge Angela Ní Chondúin said she was not relying on Hayes’s statement but on the evidence of gardaí.

“I would assume when the Tánaiste made a phone call [to gardaí], they would answer it fairly sharpishly,” the judge said.

Firstly, in 2005 McDowell was not the Tanaiste, but anyway. Would a normal Joe Soap get a such a sharpish response?