Dublin shopkeeper catches forecourt fouler with his pants down

An after midnight muckspreader who has been terrorising a Dublin* neighbourhood has been caught in the act by the very shopkeeper whose forecourt he’d been befouling.

Alan Buckley, proprietor of Clever Buys in Finglas, plonked a toilet and a pallet of loo roll on the forecourt of his shop after a number of visits from the small hours skitterer, who left dung deposits so foul that, as Buckley put it, “You’d swear a horse did it.”

While Buckley’s CCTV system captured the curb-side crapper on camera, the footage was not good enough for a positive ID, and no-one appears to have had the appetite to push for a DNA analysis of the outstanding scat.

However, it has emerged that on Wednesday the long-suffering Buckley was alerted to a third late night visit from the Finglas fouler who was duly caught with his pants down.

“I drove around and confronted him, and he admitted to doing it, but said he had a bad stomach and he couldn’t hold it in, but nobody gets caught three times at the same hour of the morning in the same place in my opinion,” Alan told The Irish Independent, which has been fearlessly splashing the story for the last couple of weeks.

Buckley was shocked his number one and two tormentor was a “local...respectable...family man” who was in possession of his own bathroom, if not complete control of his bowels.

“I asked him why he was sh***ing outside my shop and he said he was sorry, that it was nothing personal, and that it wouldn’t happen again,” Buckley told the paper.

Tracked down by an intrepid Independent reporter, the man told the paper, “It’s just something that came on me that I needed to go to the toilet, and I panicked about it and I needed to go. Then the same thing happened again. It's not about being sick or anything. I couldn't make it. I had to go and I panicked. I haven't anything against the owner of the shop."

"It's completely off the mark,” he added poignantly.

Buckley added he had not barred the man although he didn’t expect him to be back. Not even for Buckley’s famously well priced loo roll, word of which has been spread all over the place, thanks to the indepth coverage the phantom pooper has generated.

Buckley added, “All the puns in the world have been used at this stage. Everyone is talking about it.”

Well, we have to take issue there. Just a small portion of the Reg’s prodigious journalistic muscle has been devoted to this story, and we haven’t even tapped our readership’s wells of wit. Over to you folks. ®

* We note that Dublin means "dark pool" in Gaelic