"This is a Government which dragged Kathryn Sinnott all the way to the Supreme Court rather than acknowledge that it had a duty to provide her son with special needs' education.
On the constitutional rights of children
It dragged another child there rather than acknowledge a duty to provide secure units for children taken into care. Kids, legally in the care of the Government, end up on the streets on a weekly basis, a moral outrage that gives an acid bitterness to the phrase 'taken into care'. - Tuppenceworth.ie, nominated for best political blog
On in-vitro fertilisation
I find IVF easier than any other stage of our infertility journey. So far. Despite the pain in my belly, the headaches, the enormous hole in our finances, I am considerably less bitter, broken and angry than I have been since this blog began . . . The darkest days of all were during the long, hard months after my first miscarriage, before we started treatment. 13 of them . . . Each one another miscarriage, another baby I wouldn't get to hold in eight months' time. And all the time waiting, waiting, waiting for an appointment at a fertility clinic, then waiting for tests, procedures, results, battling for a chance at treatment, fighting with doctors, willing someone to allow us a shot at the best possible chance. - Waiting Game, nominated for best personal blog
On an angry morning
Ban life. Ban work. Ban paying large vomit-like chunks of PRSI that you'll never be allowed to claim back. Ban your nagging family. Ban 52-inch HD-ILA televisions. Ban Surf ads, Finish ads, electrical goods retailer ads, and evil, good-character-changing Red Bull ads. Ban Mary Harney. - Swearing Lady, nominated for best blog
On books
"It's only three years since I read Kiely's novel, The Captain with the Whiskers but it has stayed with me and will remain one of my favourite Irish novels. Like JP Donleavy's The Ginger Man, it's a very specific snapshot of a bygone Ireland (in this case, the late 1950s/early 1960s). Even though there is, what Thomas Kilroy says in his afterword of my copy of the book a 'moral indignation' in his writing, it's never bombastic. If anything, Kiely's handling of subjects like pre-marital sex and adultery are deft, sardonic and usually very funny. With Donleavy, Kiely shares a writer's ear for dialogue and a storyteller's drink-soaked musicality . . ." - Sinead Gleeson, nominated for best arts and culture blog
On climate change
In a study of over 900 scientific papers on global warming (a randomised selection of 10 per cent of all scientific papers published in the area in the last 10 years) not one scientific paper came out against global warming. Whereas the same study looked at over 600
newspaper reports on global warming and 53 per cent of them came out against climate change. - Tom Raftery's IT blog, nominated for best technical blog
On RTÉ dramas
The motto of recent RTÉ commissioning seems to be "Keep it regional. Baby". In fairness, this policy brought us Love is the Drug (Drogheda) and Pure Mule (Offaly), both entirely passable, and more importantly, watchable dramas from outside the pale.
The general consensus is that this trend is all very well and good as long as we never end up with a drama set in Cork. "This Langer", anyone? - Dublin Opinion, nominated for best news and current affairs blog
On music
Maybe I'm getting old, or maybe I'm actually too young, but I can't help but feel that dance music is in a weird time warp these days.
Perhaps it's not just dance music that's in this stasis, or even just music. This isn't even a controversial theory, is it? It reminds me of [ Francis] Fukuyama's theory about western capitalism. Although it didn't spell "the end of history" in terms of world events (9/11 NEVER FORGET etc), it always is a theory that I think of in relation to art and postmodernism.
- House is a Feeling, nominated for best music blog
On Ireland before the election
After 34 gangland murders in Dublin in the first three days of the month the Opposition accuses Minister for Justice Michael McDowell of being "as soft as Scarlett Johannson's dirty pillows" on crime. The PD leader says it's not his fault and lays the blame squarely on middle-class recreational drug users saying if it wasn't for them there'd be nobody to buy it. Bertie Ahern agrees and threatens to plunge the country into recession unless people from Foxrock and Rathgar stop buying cocaine for their dinner parties. "Maybe then you'll appreciate everything we've done for you feckless eejits," he says. Fine Gael promise to cut waiting time in hospitals, an end to people being treated in corridors and better pay and shorter working hours for nurses and doctors.
- Twenty Major, nominated for most humorous post
The above are extracts from blogs nominated for the Irish Blog Awards which are running in the Alexander Hotel, Dublin tomorrow. (http://awards.ie/blogawards/)
