IT makes me want to tear my hair out when I read reports such as those on this week’s Dublin conference — Scandinavian Childcare: making it happen — because it seems no-one asks: what is childcare?

HIS colour is canary yellow. Not red, not blue, not green. That’s the first thing that hits you when you log on to beppegrillo.it.

AM I part of the problem?

A WELCOME recognition of women’s work in the home or a misogynist attempt to keep women out of the workplace?

NOW we know the State’s share of the blame for the slavery of our women in the Magdalene laundries.

HAS the Government been playing a desperate game of ‘call my bluff’ with the European Central Bank? What are the stakes? Us or them?

THE ding-dong between the media and politics has been going on for nearly three weeks now, since Pat Rabbitte asked the question on Newstalk, “Where is this constant denigration of politics leading to?”

OUR friends used to call our 1950s house the “unrivalled opportunity” — auctioneer-speak for a “kip”.

Minutes before this man had been talking about the sanctity of each human life. Now he was dismissing the unmarked graves of the babies who died needlessly at Bethany and the stories of the home’s 25 survivors by saying it wasn’t “technically” a Church of Ireland home.

The casually intertwined lives of Haratun Batmazian and my grandfather show us a Cork throbbing with opportunity as part of the British Empire.... Irish independence was terrible for Cork. From then on Dublin... sucked the energy out of the rest of the country.