'Pizzagate' prank pulled on Tipperary TD night before Budget announcement

For this week’s Yesteryears we go back to the edition of December 13, 2012.

Making the front page that week was a story about how three south Tipperary communities were hit by a devastating Budget bombshell with the people of New Inn, Dundrum and Grangemockler left reeling from the loss of Garda Stations due to close the coming January.

Garda Station closures “good for robbers but nobody else” - the headline read.

In the Budget the Government announced the closure of one hundred garda stations around the country, three of them were in south Tipperary.

Meanwhile, a group of TDs had made a prank phone call to Mattie McGrath from the Dáil bar, on the night before the Budget. “Pizzagate” - as it had come to be known - took place the previous Tuesday night, when the south Tipp Deputy was part of a sit-in at a Dublin bank, in support of a farming family.

The five TDs rang the Independent TD pretending to be from a pizza takeaway restaurant and said they too didn’t like the banks and so would send him food.

Speaking to The Nationalist about the call at the time, Deputy McGrath said he fell for the prank “hook, line and sinker”.

A diabetic, the Newcastle Deputy said that he had not eaten since breakfast at 8am that day, and said that when the call came: “I was hungry, I was tired, I was quite weak.”

However, because of his condition he had just left the Friends First bank building to return to his hotel in Bray for nourishment.

He asked the “pizza restaurant” to deliver food to those who were still in the bank and asked them to make sure there was pizza for the two female gardaí who were on duty in the bank because of the sit-in. He then rang the group in the bank to say food was on the way.

At 2am he got a call to say the food never arrived. It was only much later that next morning, when he adjourned to the Dáil bar for a morning coffee and scone after the Order of Business in the Chamber, and his request was met with the barman’s answer: “would you like a pizza?” that the penny dropped and he realised he had been pranked.