"Stop talking so loud, you bastard"

In a disappointing announcement last night a bedraggled and sickly-looking Charlie McCreevy, Minister for Finance and Envelopes, admitted that he must have blown the entire national budget for 2001 on "booze and fags", though he couldn't be sure.

Shrugging his shoulders, McCreevy told journalists that there will thus be none of the extra money for health, education or those mega-tanks that he has been promising for years. Asked where the money had gone, McCreevy admitted that he had spent much of the Christmas and New Year period "on the raz".

It has been reported in many social columns that McCreevy had indeed attended a variety of B-List celebrity parties and was often buying drinks for sometimes up to a thousand people at these bashes. He also told journalists that he "had tried out a load of the new places in town" but that "they're all pretty much the same".

McCreevy also admitted that his social schedule had "taken it's toll" on his work. "Most nights I didn't get to bed before five or six in the morning", he said, "Sometimes not at all". But he also announced that "I think I'll go off the drink for February, though. That kind of thing gets a bit much after a while".

Asked how he would make the deficit up, McCreevy promised to take a part-time job at Ned's supermarket and that he was giving up cigarettes for the new year, "Starting tomorrow". McCreevy also touched upon the possibility of getting a loan from his local bank, but added that the local bank manager was "a prick".

He then demanded that the government should increase grants for single middle-aged men who have busy social lives.

With this devastating news, economic forecasts for Ireland are now extremely grim. The prospect of Ireland being sold to the MIT MediaLab has not been ruled out.

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