Being brought up in the era of Bobby Moore, Geoff Hurst and Martin Peters, my friend Cathal is, for his sins, a big West Ham fan.
Despite their relative lack of success since that golden era of the 1960s, he still keeps the faith, regularly travelling to see his team play at their 68,000-seater London Stadium.
It is a state-of-the-art facility, built to house the Olympic Games in 2012 and then handed over to the Hammers as their new home ground.
I met him earlier this week in Derry and we got talking football and he came out with a cracker.
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Being of a certain age, he said: “Hi Pat, do you know what’s the cost of a season ticket for a senior citizen like me at West Ham?”
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Needless to say, I didn’t. I surmised it would be around £1,500 or thereabouts.
“Wrong, it’s 197 quid,” he informed me, before quickly asking another question.
“And do you know what a season ticket for Derry City for OAPs is?”
I was thinking of phoning a friend, but decided to go the simple route: “Go on, tell me”.
He replied: “227 quid.”
You can deduce for yourselves the point he was making.
Having said that, let me digress here for a minute… the late chairman of Derry City, James McCauley, and myself were having a conversation one day and he caught me brilliantly.
We were discussing the then very much dilapidated state of the Brandywell stadium and the failure of various bodies to help fund the much-needed redevelopment
“Despite all you say, young McArt, do you know we have something at the Brandywell we can boast about, something not even Real Madrid’s magnificent Bernabeu has?”
I fell for it. “What’s that, James?”
“A greyhound track...”
Brandywell
The Brandywell stadium in Derry
Anyway, to move on swiftly, about a decade ago my youngest son was getting married and nothing would do him but for myself and my brother-in-law to join all these young lads on his stag-do down in Carrick-on-Shannon.
What a night that turned out to be.
All I will say is that the next morning I thought Concorde was coming into land and take-off in my head every five minutes, so myself and Bill, the brother-in-law, decided our top priority was to get breakfast as a matter of some urgency.
It was a very quiet Saturday morning, around 9-ish, and the only place we could see open was a café, so in we went and ordered ‘an Irish fry‘ – I don’t know the difference between that and an Ulster one – and were each charged €9.99 for the privilege.
I thought nothing of it at the time, but about three weeks later I was in in Spain and I went to ‘Dave’s Place’ in Torrevieja where I got, basically, the same breakfast for - wait for it - €2.99.
Spot the difference?
It seems to me it’s a pretty widespread phenomenon.
An Ulster fry is the breakfast of champions
You can tell a lot about the cost of living by the price of an Ulster fry
I recall a young English journalist coming to work in the Derry Journal who nearly fell off her chair when doing a bit of research into the differences in cross-border living.
While not at all relevant to the topic, what surprised her was that during her endeavours she discovered the Donegal County Manager earned more than the prime minister of Spain.
Of course, we shouldn’t really be surprised about all this as we have a long record in this regard.
Just for the sake of accuracy, I googled it and found out that the taoiseach, Micheál Martin, earns €248,773 annually. This, keep in mind, is for a state with a population of just over five million people.
Again, by way of contrast, Sir Keir Starmer’s remuneration is £172,153, despite having to deal with the concerns of roughly 13 times the Republic’s population.
Starmer’s salary, I should add, is just about £30,000 more than that of the chief executive of Derry and Strabane District Council.
And, of course, amidst all this, let’s not forget the price of a pint.
In both Dublin and Belfast it’s highly unlikely you’ll get a jar of the black stuff for less than six quid, and in certain parts of the former you’ll be paying almost double that.
And I have paid more than £3 for a coffee on both sides of the border.
The big picture here is that for a large cohort of people, life is a struggle and it is getting a lot worse, and that is getting, it seems to me, glossed over way too glibly.
I have heard numerous pundits come on Radio Ulster and refer to the Republic as being ‘awash with cash’.
They seem to be judging the success of the economy on a few multi-national corporations raking in millions, and the hugely inflated salaries of those at the top of the food chain.
There is never the same focus on those who cannot afford homes, who are paying exorbitant rents in the big cities like Dublin, Cork and Galway – in some cases €2,000 a month – or on the never-ending hospital waiting lists.
Here in the north it’s even worse.
We have the longest hospital waiting lists on these island by some distance. More than half a million people here – that is almost a third of the population – are on those lists.
And try surviving on a pension of £230 a week, which is the lowest paid in Europe bar, I believe, Bulgaria, when a single bag of coal can cost more than £30.
Here’s the thing. If we really want to judge a society, let’s check out how it looks after those at the bottom.
And right now neither north nor south is doing a great job in this regard.
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