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The cover of the 2025 edition of Waterford Whispers News, a collection of satirical articles and illustrations. Gill Books
Satire
Waterford Whispers News Local dodgy box guy sends you a friend request
Read three satirical articles from this year’s edition of Waterford Whispers News.
The below extracts are satire and are taken from the 2025 edition of Waterford Whispers News published by Gill Books.
DODGY BOX GUY SENDS FRIEND REQUEST
The local dodgy box guy your mate John was raving about in the pub the other night has just sent you a friend request, sparking a quiet but intense moral spiral.
The man, believed to reside in that council estate with all the kamikaze kids on bikes, reportedly fired off the unsolicited request in the early hours of the morning, possibly prompted by your mutual pint-fuelled discussion about how Sky is ripping you off again, the cunts. According to sources, the dodgy box guy charges anywhere between €150 and €200 a year for access to the shadowy TV underworld. It may involve a Fire Stick, a mysterious code, or an update ‘every now and then’, but rest assured – you’ll get everything. Everything!
Despite being paralysed by indecision and already spending 90% of your evenings scrolling past absolute muck on streaming platforms, you find yourself tempted. Not just by the unlimited content, but by the opportunity to lead your own clandestine pub conversations, like a moonshine dealer in the golden age of bootlegging whiskey: ‘Ah, yeah, I’ve a fella. Does all the sports, the lot. He’s sound too.
More on this story as your existential TV crisis continues buffering.
DRACONIAN LEPRECHAUN LAW REQUIRING TINY ROUNDABOUTS FINALLY ABOLISHED
A 400-YEAR-OLD LAW requiring every town and village in Ireland to install a minimum number of miniature roundabouts to cater for leprechauns has finally been abolished, WWN can confirm.
The tiny roundabouts, mostly useless for modern traffic, were first introduced in 1678 as part of an inclusivity campaign aimed at integrating leprechaun minorities into Irish infrastructure. However, following the tragic leprechaun massacre of 1898, the law will now be scrapped, leading to the removal of thousands of redundant traffic islands
nationwide.
‘Motorists these days just drive straight over them, so they’re essentially pointless,’ an RSA spokesperson said. ‘Some towns have dozens of the things and it’s become a bit of a running joke among tourists, most of whom have no idea what they were originally for.’
Prior to their extinction, the leprechaun community was believed to have invented the roundabout as an elegant, stop-sign-free solution to busy junctions – an idea later stolen and upscaled by ‘the big people’.
‘Over time, we adopted roundabouts as our own,’ explained one pro-mini-roundabout campaigner. ‘But then we started sticking traffic lights and pedestrian crossings at every exit, which kind of defeats the whole purpose. We’ve gone full circle, as the fella says.’
Meanwhile, the centuries-old law mandating oversized speed bumps remains firmly in place.
‘We still have a significant population of giants in Ireland,’ an RSA official explained. ‘Though we are reviewing proposals to reduce the height of the bumps by a few metres, just to be fair.’
DESPITE HOLLYWOOD’S RELUCTANCE, CRAZED MOVIE FANS KEEP DEMANDING INFERIOR SOULLESS REMAKES OF CLASSIC FILMS
Hollywood studio heads have pleaded with rabid entertainment fans to stop forcing them at gunpoint to make underwhelming remakes of popular movies and TV shows.
‘You think we want to keep churning out this creatively bankrupt sludge?’ asked one weary studio head, who moments earlier had greenlit a baffling remake of The Bodyguard.
‘If it were up to us, we’d be backing genre-defying spectacles helmed by visionary auteurs with complete creative freedom. But no – you animals won’t allow it.’
‘New, original, groundbreaking, that’s all I want, but if I dared to produce something like that, you movie fans would firebomb my house,’ said the Disney exec who okayed the recent turgid and joyless Snow White remake.
The reliance on remaking popular intellectual properties owned by movie studios is becoming ever more present, solely due to movie fans’ appetite for really, really inferior movies that they hate and will never pay to see.
‘Naked Gun remake, Roadhouse, American Psycho reimagined, Harry Potter TV show. Fine, damn you all, damn you all to hell. You can have all of them. I just wanted to make a €250 million epic about the marine biologists who discovered clownfish can change sex. But no – you’ve killed creativity,’ screamed one executive, collapsing to their knees in despair.
Despite these desperate cries, studios have confirmed several new remakes are already in production, including an emotionally hollow War of the Roses reboot and a gritty live action Biker Mice from Mars Universe nobody asked for.
‘Just know this,’ one producer said softly. ‘Every time we reboot something you once loved, a writer with a bold, beautiful script dies a little inside.’
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