by Peter Quinn
Sex crime
29 August 2010
Customer: There was nothing in the papers or the radio but talk of whether to name or disclose the addresses of anyone convicted of sex crimes. It’s an important issue, but it’s like when a big story breaks there’s nothing else discussed.
Barber: There was a story a customer told me about a woman in south Wales a few years ago who had her house vandalised by an anti-paedophile mob. They sprayed ‘paedo’ across her front door. It turned out when the police looked into it that she was a paediatrician. Information can be a dangerous thing in the wrong hands!
Customer: Maybe they were dyslexic!
The health service
30 August 2010
Customer: There’s a Romanian woman who sells the Big Issue outside the shop I work in, and she’s very friendly, so over the last year we’ve gotten to know her. But a while ago she disappeared for weeks, and no-one knew where she was. She had told us her husband wasn’t well and they were waiting for an operation for him, and we started to think the worst. Then, out of the blue, last week she was back selling outside the shop again. We asked her where she’d been, and she told us that they’d been waiting for so long for her husband’s operation that she decided to book flights home for herself and her husband. They went to the hospital, arranged the operation in Romania for free, had a holiday, saw the family and came back!
Barber: That’s incredible. They could get the operation so quickly over there, and for free! What’s going on over here?
Cuckoo land
31 August 2010
Customer: The sentences the judges are passing down for serious crimes are ridiculous. The law is no deterrent any more!
Barber: They’re all living in cuckoo land, far removed from the real world. So are a lot of the politicians. Look at Pádraig Flynn’s argument on ‘The Late Late Show’, for example, telling the nation that he was stretched by the cost of running his three houses, the maids and the cars. It would all be so funny if it wasn’t so serious.
Gill & Macmillan
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© Peter Quinn 2011
First published by Gill & Macmillan 2011
This ebook edition published by Gill & Macmillan 2011 Illustrations by Eoin Coveney
9780717151905 (epub)
9780717152490 (mobi)
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be copied, reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without permission of the publishers.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
About the Author
Peter Quinn is a Dublin barber with a keen ear for a good story. This quirky collection of exchanges with his customers range from funny to eye opening, covering everything from the weather and the economy to the fall of the church and the spiralling cost of NAMA. Yet each tale is as individual as the customer and his hairstyle.
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About the Publisher
Gill & Macmillan publishes a wide range of Irish-interest non-fiction, from history to economics, politics to cookery and biography to children’s. Since 1968 we have published outstanding authors and groundbreaking books such as David McWilliams’ The Pope’s Children, Noel Browne’s Against the Tide, Garret FitzGerald’s All in a Life, Augustine Martin’s Soundings and three generations of Ballymaloe’s Allen family on our cookery list.
Our story begins in 1856 when Michael Henry Gill, then printer for Dublin University, purchased the publishing and bookselling business of James McGlashan, forming McGlashan & Gill. In 1875 the name was changed to M.H. Gill & Son. In 1968 Gill & Macmillan was established as a result of an association with Macmillan of London, which had been founded in 1843. Gills had a shop on Dublin’s O’Connell St that sold books for 123 years until 1979. Today our bookshop can be found at www.gillmacmillan.ie.
Gill & Macmillan also publishes a well-established range of educational books and resources for all levels: primary, secondary, college and university. We also provide a distribution service for the majority of Ireland’s independent publishers.
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Short Back and Sides: Tales From An Irish Barber Shop – Peter Quinn