How hard can it be to find a nice pressie for Dad? Here's 10 fail-safe ideas

ARE we Dads actually that hard to buy Christmas presents for?

Are we? REALLY, like?

This seems to be the new accepted wisdom. It has crept into the general consciousness in much the same way all those daft American GOP nutjobs have come to accept replacement theory. ‘Sure himself is very hard to buy for’, I hear you say casually over a seasonally-themed latté. ‘I mean, what do you get the man who has everything?’

Well, here are ten things just off the top of my head.

A collection of titanium drill bits. Any book about World War I. Any book about World War II. Comfortable shoes. A motorbike. Anything in the middle aisle in your local German supermarket. A big f*** off bag of kiln-dried logs. Ten minutes of peace alone in the car by the beach. The DVD box set of Shane MacGowan’s funeral. Anything directly relating to Bruce Springsteen (eg concert tickets), or even BSA, which stands for ‘Bruce Springsteen adjacent’ (eg a mug saying ‘Dad’s The Real Boss’).

See, it’s not that hard, is it?

This isn’t scientific but I can almost guarantee that 87.5% of the Irish Da Contingent would love any one of those random gifts I just came up with off the top of my head. I didn’t even try and I still did better than most of ye did last year.

Quite frankly, I am tired of Dad being left at the fag end of the shopping list. We’re the last gobshite to be crossed off as you race manically around town at half-five on Christmas Eve, after Uncle Frank and the cousins’ cousins’ new baby. And then you glance at a basement bin on the way to the counter and do a Packie Bonner dive across the floor to grab some ghost-written GAA autobiography or an airport-sized carton of Lynx Africa.

Lads, I am here to tell ye now that it is not good enough. We are modern men with modern expectations. A pair of trucker socks and a tube of toothpaste won’t cut it anymore. We’ve all watched the Beckham documentary and we have dreams. Big man dreams.

Now I don’t want to destroy Christmas in West Cork by dividing every household in two like some lad wielding the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1921. I want to spread joy and goodwill among men and women.

All I am saying is, we can do better, right? So off with ye now, there are still a few hours left to redeem yourselves. But let ye be warned. Names are being taken. I will be reporting back in January.

No Cop-on about plastic

COP28 shuddered to a close like an oil tanker running aground in the desert last week.

It’s impossible as a regular punter to understand if it has been effective or just another talking shop. The fact that the Saudi Arabian representative was the only one who refused to stand and applaud at the end is a good sign I suppose. But maybe that was all orchestrated too.

The leaders finally agreed to ‘phase out’ fossil fuels when an earlier form of the text simply committed to a ‘reduction’, so that is certainly progress.

I was struck by a piece by Caroline O’Donoghue earlier in the week, writing in the Irish Independent, who pointed out that there was no mention of plastics, one of the biggest offshoots for the fossil fuel industry.

While there are talks underway to negotiate a global plastics treaty to reduce virgin plastics, in the meantime, that market is forecast to double by 2040. And it turns out that Adnoc, the Emirati state oil company of which Cop28 president Sultan Al-Jaber is chief, has an ever-expanding side business in plastics.

No wonder they were all so happy with themselves.

I’ll leaf it to the weeds

I KNOW many of you are probably wondering how I am getting on with the leaves in my driveway on Dublin’s Northside, after my report from a few weeks back.

They’ve come back twice since, like Michael Myers at the end of Halloween. It never ends. And yet back out I go to have at it again with the rake like some poor git in a Sam Beckett play.

The latest in Dublin is that they want us to stop concreting our driveways as it’s causing flooding. The water has nowhere to soak away it seems, and this is a particular problem around the areas of Rathmines and Ranelagh, where hipsters have razed whole ecosystems to the ground to put in electric car charging points to save the planet.

The good news in all this is that it is a carte blanche for people like me to let nature take over the front of our homes again. No more raking leaves, or weeding between the cracks. It’s time to put the feet up and let the whole place go to hell.

Meanwhile, in London, so desperate are they for space to house their cars that a balcony in South Kensington has been sold for £35k to a buyer who needed a parking permit.

The new owner, who will pay a £1,300 annual service charge, had bought a property nearby that had no parking. You get the feeling that our collective obsession with the automobile is not going to age well.

A hole in one down under

I WAS reading during the week about the Australian woman charged with stealing a van carrying 10,000 doughnuts.

It’s unclear if the woman knew what the van contained when she stole it – her tasty haul included Christmas-themed and classic doughnuts destined for Krispy Kreme. Later, it was alleged that all the doughnuts were ‘spoilt’ when recovered by the cops.

​​​​​​​Spoilt, eh? There’s a fairly big hole in that story, if you ask me.