The Rush Of Bingo

The secret life of the bingo enthusiast

Does your grandmother frequent the bingo halls? You better check her nose when she comes home.

Gardai have alerted the public to the latest trend among our elderly, and it is a danger to their already precarious health. Yes, it's drugs. The old ladies with the sheets of numbers spread before them are playing bingo under the influence of cocaine.

Clearly the thrill of bingo is no longer enough of a rush for these grannies.

Helen Heaphy was arrested outside of Ireland's popular Rock Bingo emporium. Where bingo rocks, indeed. It's the whole rock 'n roll culture with all its excesses, the drug-taking and the binge bingo-playing far into the night when a respectable gran would be home in bed. Instead, they're snorting a line and buying another game card, burning through your inheritance by the way.

Ms. Heaphy is one of those grandmothers, although she claimed to be "holding" the cocaine for someone else who was supposed to take it off her hands. The quantity in her possession was small, indicating that she is no major player in the illicit drugs trade. In her defense, she said that she was not intending to bring the drugs into the bingo hall, but was only delivering them to some unnamed second party.

Delivering the cocaine to another grandmother, you can be sure, and most likely an entire party of retirees out for a night of wilding.

The judicial system cannot conceive of these supposedly innocent women seeking more stimulation than they would ordinarily find in the joy of winning a game, to say nothing of the thrill of waiting for that one critical number to be called.

The judge accepted Ms. Heaphy's expression of guilt and remorse without ever probing further. Who was she holding the cocaine for, and why was she waiting outside a bingo hall to deliver it? Who goes to the bingo halls but our grandmothers, those self-effacing angels who can't get out of the house fast enough on bingo night.

You thought it was all about bingo, didn't you. It's the cocaine they're after, delivered by one of their own who was just following the Jesuit axiom to be of service to others.

After little more than a slap on the wrist, Ms. Heaphy is again allowed near the Rock Bingo building. She has been given three months to pay her fine, a considerable sum for a grandmother separated from her husband, and with a family to tend.

There are other bingo parlors in Ireland where grandmothers need a little snort to liven up the night. Will the scourge of cocaine-fueled bingo binges be allowed to continue now that the door into this sordid world has been cracked open?