Irish people reveal hilarious ‘parent threats’ they believed when they were bold at Christmas

Irish people have been revealing the hilarious things their parents used to threaten them with when they were younger and ‘acting the maggot.’

Many families will be reminiscing this Christmas about times when they were younger, and so one man started the conversation off late last night on Reddit.

He wrote: “For the week that’s in it, did all parents used make empty threats when you were acting the a*se?

“My auld lad used to threaten us with 'the big stick' if we were misbehaving. 'I'll get the big stick' was usually enough to quieten us.

“I have a toddler now, and I'm beginning to think what my empty threat will be in years to come.

“What was your mother’s/father’s empty threat growing up?”

Irish people reveal hilarious ‘parent threats’ they believed when they were bold at Christmas (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

The post attracted hundreds of Irish respondents with their own versions from their childhood, and some of them will be very relatable to any readers that grew up in an Irish family.

One person responded saying their parents used to say they would send the kids "to boarding school. We were petrified of that.

“Eventually we realised that our parents had nowhere near enough money to send any of us to boarding school.”

Another told of how their mum and dad would say “if I played PlayStation for more than three hours the console would blow up on a timer.

“As I got older, listening to my PlayStation now sound like a Boeing 747, there might have been some legitimacy to the theory.”

A third, and rather common trend in the responses, was the warning that: “‘You'll be feckin' sent to live with Maggie Mary if you keep that up!’

“Maggie Mary was a wild woman who lived about two miles walk into the middle of a forest on the mountain.”

A fourth person responded to the post and said he was afraid he would “be put up for sale in the window of Supervalu.

“There was a period when I was quite small that I didn't fully believe but was extremely fearful that naughty children did indeed get sold via supermarket window displays.”

Another similar response was that “there was a shed out the back of our credit union and whenever you'd walk past it these vicious dogs would hop off the sides of the shed barking like mad.

“My parents used to say that's where the bold children go. So the threat was always ‘if you're not good, you'll go to the credit union.’ Looking back it was a really weird threat if heard out of context.”