O’Neill’s reading broke records

A Coalisland ex-barrister, Javier O’Neill, is in police custody tonight having been caught fooling the local doctor into claiming for incapacity benefit since 2008. O’Neill (56), officially ‘off on the sick’ at the time, was unveiled as a fraudster after the suspicious doctor admitted he had resorted to setting up CCTV cameras around the town to follow Javier’s movements. Dr Laverty told us:

“I hadn’t slept for weeks thinking about this man. He’d come in to the surgery once a month with a blood pressure reading completely off the scale. It was something like 300/200. In the history of medicine, a reading like this had never been recorded. Add to that, his pulse rate was 180 at resting point. No matter what dosage of tablets I put him on, he’d come back with the same readings. It was either a miracle or this boy O’Neill was a freak of science. Even if you had the weight of the world’s problems on your shoulders, you wouldn’t have these readings. This man should have been dead long ago.”

Doctor Laverty travelled the length and breadth of the planet in order to show off the Coalisland man’s readings to medical experts. Unable to find an answer and with the cream of the medical world asking to descend on Tyrone to witness this man in action, Laverty set up a couple of CCTV cameras around the town to capture O’Neill in his daily routine. Nothing showed up until the day of his appointment.

“I was about to admit defeat when I check the cameras just before his arrived. Suddenly I noticed Javier sprinting from the top of Platers Hill to the bottom, half an hour before the appointment. Then he’d run back up again. He did this 7 times in total, a remarkable feat for a 56 year old man. He’d then wipe the sweat from his brow, settle himself and come in for the appointment. That explains the reading. I did always smell sweat but that’d be typical of a Coalisland resident.”

His incapacity benefit of £500 a week was immediately stopped today and other high blood pressure cases are being looked into.