nothing. I have no illusions about myself. There is no glory or anything to this. The only people who will remember me will be my family and particularly my children." It is possible that the June 1993 assassination attempt had brought out a fatalistic quality in him, for during one interview he commented on his nickname, saying "what do you do with a Mad Dog except put it down?". Before his death, he told a local detective "you either hide or you go on living as long as you can". Vincent Browne asked McGlinchey what he thought would happen to him eventually. McGlinchey answered: I will probably get shot. There is a good possibility of my not seeing the end of the struggle. I could be lucky but just because I have been set up by the media as the most wanted man in Ireland, I suppose that increases the chances of my getting done in. But I don't really give it a lot of thought, I always try to avoid being shot. Cultural depictions In the early 1990s novelist Edna O'Brien interviewed McGlinchey several times in Portlaoise while meticulously researching her novel House of Splendid Isolation. In the novel, the protagonist is an on-the-run republican terrorist named Roger McGreevy. Believing he has found an empty house to hole up in, he discovers an elderly woman in residence. The narrative explores the evolving relationship between the two, which moves from fear and distrust on her part to "a sort of mutual liking, even tenderness", writes the critic John Dunne, although noting that McGreevy "is no Mad Dog". The scholar Richard Bradford argues that the novel indicates a degree of "macabre" hero worship on behalf of O'Brien towards McGlinchey, upon whom scholars accept she generally based the character and who she treats with concomitant sympathy: McGreevy describes himself as seeking "Justice. Personal identity. Truth". Similarities between McGreevy and McGlinchey include their wives having been killed previously, both being interned at a young age and both spending their lives on the run. O'Brien, comments the researcher John Maher, "builds up, through the old woman's interactions with McGreevy, an increasingly sympathetic picture of the terrorist [which] reflects O 'Brien's own strong republican sympathies". O'Brien's interviews with McGlinchey were themselves notorious, and demonstrated her willingness to court controversy. O'Brien herself denied that the character was McGlinchey. She countered that, while "he certainly played a