Neil Mackay

Glasgow, London, Northern Ireland

Writer-at-Large at The Herald (Scotland)

Journalist, author, filmmaker, broadcaster. Writer at Large @heraldscotland MDANT🎖️Made in Ireland, found in Scotland

Articles

When AI kills off the ScotRail lady, you know we’re all in trouble

4 days ago | heraldscotland.com | Neil Mackay

Fletcher Mathers, the Scottish actress who voiced ScotRail announcements for 20 years, has just been binned in favour of AI (Image: PA/Ryan McGoverne) I found myself having a conversation with AI last month. I’ve resisted engaging with this monster technology until now, but my voyeuristic inquisitiveness could no longer be contained. I had to take a peek into the locked room in the ogre’s castle marked "Danger". I’m about to finish a first draft of my latest novel.
Glasgow’s ‘blight and dereliction’ makes it ‘Britain’s Detroit’ – Niall Murphy

6 days ago | heraldscotland.com | Neil Mackay

Nobody knows Glasgow better than architect Niall Murphy. To mark its 850th anniversary, he tells our Writer at Large about Glasgow’s journey from leading world city to a place of ‘blight’ TRAGEDY is the word Niall Murphy uses most to describe Glasgow. When he tells Glasgow’s story, when he leads you down the centuries and through the streets of this place he loves, a vision unfolds of a small, primitive settlement rising from the mud of the Clyde to become one of the world’s great cities.
Yes to Flamingoland, no to National Parks: what is the SNP playing at?

1 week ago | heraldscotland.com | Neil Mackay

Many locals voiced their opposition to proposals only for their voices to be ignored and drowned out. (Image: Colin Mearns/Newsquest) As an Irishman there’s a risk that what I’m about to say will result in an exclusion order placed on me the next time I try to return to the land where I was raised. You see, whilst I consider Ireland beautiful - stunning, dramatic, mystical and breathtaking - my adopted homeland Scotland is even more gorgeous, more awe-inspiring.
Wine bar fakes like Farage talking about working class make me sick

1 week ago | heraldscotland.com | Neil Mackay

What does Nigel Farage know about the working class? (Image: Getty) A working-class hero is indeed something to be, something worth celebrating, especially these days, in the nepo-baby era when family connections and mummy and daddy’s money appear the only sure path to success in life.
SNP will be the winner as Reform outflanks Labour from the left

1 week ago | heraldscotland.com | Neil Mackay

When I was nine, my father took me to the most remarkable magic show I’ve ever seen. In a tent, on a windy hill along the north Antrim coast, a magician turned a man into a gorilla before our eyes. There were no curtains, no puffs of smoke. In the dim light, the man just slowly changed from human to ape. When the human was gone and only the gorilla remained on stage, a suit of clothes lay at its feet: all that was left of the man.
'I'm just a wee bam from Grangemouth' says Green leader hopeful Mackay

1 week ago | heraldscotland.com | Neil Mackay

She worries about the lack of any meaningful legislation emerging from Holyrood this session, despite being the woman behind the creation of Scotland’s abortion buffer zones. The new law hit the headlines globally, and enraged America’s vice-president.
Labour’s taste for biological extremism is both creepy and dangerous

2 weeks ago | heraldscotland.com | Neil Mackay

The past should be learned from, and viewed as we view our youth: full of mistakes we won’t repeat. The future should be approached like a tightrope walker: slowly inching forward in case haste tips us to our death. Nowhere is this more true than in the field of technology and science. In years gone by, should we not have been much more cautious in what we did with the power of the atom? Would we still give free rein to the internet as we did in the 1990s?
Why Clarkson’s cracks about Scotland make him a bloody idiot

2 weeks ago | heraldscotland.com | Neil Mackay

Jeremy Clarkson said the scrapping of peak rail fares was "communism" (Image: PA) An interesting new phrase has emerged: "disordered discourse". It attempts to explain the collapse of political debate in the West. The term migrated from psychiatry where it’s used to explain language distortions like patients becoming wildly hyperbolic, going off at tangents, exhibiting strange associations between ideas or veering into incoherence.
The super-rich are lying to us. Time we turned the tables

2 weeks ago | heraldscotland.com | Neil Mackay

Sir Tom Hunter has called for us to follow Singapore's low-tax policies (Image: Colin Mearns) With travel so expensive now, you can easily substitute a trip to the Palace of Versailles with some hours reading the Rich List. The effect is similar.
I don’t exaggerate, this Scottish translation deserves the Nobel Prize for Literature

2 weeks ago | heraldscotland.com | Neil Mackay

Balle, a Danish writer, gained international acclaim in 1993 with her short-story collection According to the Law: Four Accounts of Mankind. She then effectively disappeared, retreating to a small Baltic island. Nobody heard much from her, but that was because she was working on the seven volumes of On the Calculation of Volume. If only every wrier spent nearly 30 years on their next work.