Phil Mac Giolla Bháin

2010 President Palin

14th September 2008

The year is 2010. Two years from now. President John McCain finally loses his battle against cancer. There is a ceremony as laid down by the founding fathers. The office of the presidency of the United States of America transfers from President McCain (deceased) to President Palin. President Palin………….. From that moment there is an extra person in Sarah Palin’s security entourage. There is a military officer with the attaché case as beloved of spy movies handcuffed to his wrist. This person is a commissioned officer in the U.S. military, pay-grade O-4 or above, who has undergone the nation’s most …

Why feminists are like John McCain

13th September 2008

Carol Hunt of the Sunday Independent in Ireland (www.unison.ie) is, I think, rather like John McCain. It isn’t that she doesn’t care about male suicide. She does. It is that she just doesn’t get it. She mentioned my book “Preventable Death” in a piece on Sunday 7th September 2008. She spent most of the column fulminating about the cover design. Now I can no more take the credit for that book cover than I could a Rembrandt. As our American cousins would say ” he hit it straight out of the park!” I did say that I wanted the death …

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 …

The Provisional SNP comes of age.

2nd October 202331st July 2008

Twenty-one years ago, I trudged the mean streets of Glasgow’s East End, proffering a message hardly anyone there wanted to hear. I wasn’t a Jehovah’s Witness, nor was I selling insurance, although I might as well have been.

Terminal Decline

11th July 2008

The cautionary tale of post Blair Britain. 100 years ago, a mere nanosecond in the human story, the Westminster parliament was the political centre of the biggest extension of global political power since the Roman Empire. In 1908 the British Empire spanned the planet it was the first truly global exercise of power. In 2008 British troops are huddled in Basra airbase as the descendants of the fighters to that took on General Haldane’s troops fight it out for control of the Iraqi city. The soldiers of the Queen look on impotently as a Shia on Shia civil war unfolds. …

Why Blog?

7th July 2008

It is over twenty years since I sold my first opinion piece to a Newspaper (the Scotsman). The paper was still in the hot metal phase, although that change was looming.