A study carried out by the Irish Parties Association, or IPA, has concluded that approximately fifty percent of all time at parties in Ireland is spent waiting on the off license to open.
According to IPA spokesperson, Bren Bean, the study’s findings are based on three major factors; the Irish people’s fondness for a drink, their inability to buy enough drink to last the duration of a party and the country’s “arse ways” licensing laws.
“The first thing that we looked at in the survey was the amount of times a social gathering in someone’s house could be declared a party,” explained Mr. Bean. “We found that one hundred percent of instances where three or more people met in a house, for any sort of social occasion, turned into a party. Knitting groups, book clubs, movie knights, sporting occasions, dinner parties and even funerals all undoubtedly ended up with drink taken and then a long agonising wait for the off licenses to open again the next morning.”
“The reason that this long agonising wait happens every time is because the Irish, much like people from most other countries, have absolutely no idea of their own limits when it comes to how much drink they’ll drink over the course of a twelve hour party,” claimed Mr. Bean during an early morning chat with Wunderground, which took place while killing time waiting for a local off license to open. “There’s an old cliche about people not knowing their own strength, but when your main strength is how much you can drink you’d think we’d know it by now. We found that, on average, people spend four hours waiting for the off license to open on a Saturday morning and six hours on a Sunday morning.”
“The difference between the two days is because, for some reason, you can’t have a drink as early on a Sunday as you can every other day of the week,” continued a baffled Mr. Bean. “I think it has something to do with God not wanting people showing up to mass drunk, or something like that, although statistics show that the number of drunk people in mass has not dropped at all since the changes were made to the licensing laws and that most of the drunk people in mass are actually priests who have twenty four hour access to eucharist wine anyway.”
According to the study, the other fifty percent of the time spent at parties is decided between looking for a good place to stash your drink dancing, talking shit, taking drugs, trying to get your hole, deciding who owns the last beer in the fridge and then working out who will make the trip to the off license.
