August 2008 – Phil Mac Giolla Bháin

Child Protection (except weekends & bank holidays)

16th August 2008

Phil was invited to discuss the issue of no out of hours emergency contact for the HSE’s Child Protection ‘services’ which resulted in a 15 year old boy spending the night in a make-shift bed in Garda station as the emergency numbers provided were not covered at the weekend. You can listen to the audio file of an interview from the George Hook show, The Right Hook, by Kevin Myers. This was broadcast live in August 2008 and has been kindly provided by Newstalk Radio. The audio file is an MP3 file and clicking on the link will open it …

The Scots have a word for it

14th August 2008

The Scots have a word for appallingly dismal weather – well they would have to by now wouldn’t they? Dreech. Feel the quality of that word dripping down the back of your neck and it incrementally racks up the misery index. Dreech. It was indeed a dreech day last week when I travelled with my son from the East End of Glasgow, where I was visiting my mother, to travel to the country’s capital. When I was my son’s age in the 1970s Edinburgh wasn’t really the capital of anything. Today it feels like a capital city. In a cautious …