He's already Sir David to Northern Ireland fans but David Healy's one step closer to that knighthood he so obviously deserves after receiving a well-deserved MBE for "services to football and the community" in the Queen's birthday honours list.

The timing of the award couldn't be more fitting as Healy is today hosting the 2008 David Healy Fitba Day, a free kids football coaching session in Cookstown which is, according to the IFA, the biggest event of its kind ever known to to take place in the British Isles.

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2 pieces of good news greeted me when I arrived home on Friday lunch time. The first was that the voters of the Republic of Ireland had rejected the EU constitution. I'd like to believe the Czech president when he said ratification cannot go ahead following this but the British foreign minister has said we should continue with our process of ratification (when he says 'our' I think he means Labour's, after all today's hiccup shows you can't trust the people to make the right decision) and José Manuel Barroso (EC President) insists the treaty isn't dead. The EU are totally adept at ignoring popular opinion when it suits them, even if it is so bluntly stated.

Brian Cowen, the new leader of the Southern government, blames the no camp for confusing voters and that many people raised objections to issues not covered by the treaty. Then again it was the government's Yes camp who aimed to focus voters attention on the benefits of the EU rather than the Constitution they were actually voting on. And this is the main problem with the EU: the arrogant, 'we know best' attitude to its citizens.

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Sinn Fein have spent the last few days stirring up the idea that they will refuse to nominate McGuinness to serve with Peter Robinson. They may refuse to do so, citing their difficulties with the Irish Language Act and, rather disingenuously, Ruane's problems with academic selection.

If the latter point was really an issue for them, they wouldn't moan about it, they'd take the opportunity to shuffle her out of the Executive. Maybe the Irish Language Act is the problem

But if they do push this to an election in September, they would reset the electoral clock. They may push the SDLP out of the executive if they're lucky, but they would certainly keep well ahead of them but they would defiantly push the next election from March 2011 to September 2012. Is there any particular reason they would want to do that? Who knows.

Tom Hartley succeeded Jim Rogers as the new Lord Mayor last night. DECAL minister Nigel Dodds said:

"It was very noticeable that the leader of the Ulster Unionist group, David Browne, failed to back the Unionist candidates and in return he got the Sinn Fein vote for Deputy Lord Mayor, I think it was appalling, there was obviously some sort of deal done."

Nigel Dodds, thinks it's appalling, to do a deal with Sinn Fein. What is it they say about people in glass houses?

On Slugger there is some conspiricy theorists having an outing since Sir Reg wasn't there. He's ill, that's all.

Isn't a "sectarian consensus" an oxymoron?

I'm preparing to go on a two week holiday and as I was out buying sun cream and collecting some Euros I noticed an odd headline on the chest of one of those guys selling the Tele at busy junctions. According to the ever-reliable Belfast Telegraph and an anonymous source, Sinn Fein are contemplating refusing to nominate a Deputy First Minister because they are frustrated at the lack of progress over what they see as key issues (mainly the devolution of Policing and Justice I'd imagine).

Leaving aside the fact that Sinn Fein knew fine well that there were no guarantees on that target date (as has been pointed out over and over on Slugger O'Toole) what exactly have they got to gain by refusing to nominate? The DUP won't be able to elect their new leader Peter Robinson as First Minister, which, I gather, means no executive, which, again correct me if I'm wrong, means no Assembly. They expect the DUP to back down and hand over a few concessions to keep the Assembly alive?

Ballocks. If Sinn Fein want to bring about an end to the Assembly then let them, it will be no great loss as far as I'm concerned. It will also be a PR disaster for the provisional republican movement, with the world able to see clear as day whose fault it was that our beloved institutions collapsed.

No, they're far too canny for that. This is either a couple of Sinners shit-stirring in the shadows, tabloid journalism at its worst or a bit of both.

Right, I'm torn about how best to display recent commenter activity at Evertyhing Ulster in the sidebar over to your right.

• The default way with b2Evolution is to display the "Recent Comments" where you get a list of who has posted and on what topic.
• I hacked that a little bit to display "Hot Topics" instead. Here, each individual post can't be listed more than once, so only the most recent comment is shown. It gives a more varied range of topics at the expense of clarity as to how many comments have been made recently.
• There's also the list of recent posts which doesn't bother at all with comments, but I think it's a related issue. Do we need it at all when you can just go to the Home page instead?

To illustrate what I mean, at the time of writing "Recent Comments" has 10 comments all emanating from the same 3 posts. On the other hand, although the post "Why Blog?" has 4 of the last 10 comments, Hot Topics only lists it once (linking to the most recent comment).

I don't think having all 3 is an option as it takes up too much space. Anyway, let me know what you think. Feel free to leave a comment if you think the choice is too straightforward or feel very strongly about it. People power and all that guff.

Edit

One other thing I should've pointed out is that, from a purely selfish PoV, other bloggers may prefer Recent Comments because their name will link to the URL they enter, whereas in Hot Topics it links to their comment. Don't rely on this staying the case though, if I keep Recent Comments I'll likely link the name to the comment and the title to the original blog post.

"Citizen journalism", as it's been dubbed, is not perfect and nor is it always presented in an appealing format. There are numerous outlets for news both in print media and online, so why bother blogging?

The answer to this question is illustrated perfectly by Ed Curran, editor of the NIO rag, the Belfast Telegraph (which, I believe, is Northern Ireland's biggest-selling daily). While the Tele is making big noises about how it's holding Stormont to account (which, to some degree, is a fair claim), Curran's newspaper has not only ignored potentially the biggest waste of money in local politics recently, but actively participated in it as a cheerleader.

This is a trend that Curran continued on Monday when he penned a cringe-worthy Won't Somebody Think of the Children style "letter", ostensibly to David Healy, in Monday's paper bemoaning the death throes of the Maze stadium as if they were a bad thing instead of the reprieve we've been waiting for. This column was so bad it could only appear in a paper where the author is the editor (then again it's nothing new, he has form in that regard).

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I just wanted to apologise to some local bloggers for my lack of presence on their blogs recently. Unfortunately, while I can still read the blogs, I can no longer respond to posts on the Blogger/Blogspot platform during office hours. I'm not ignoring you guys, honest. Keep up the good work.

Next year the Irish League will be reorganised with clubs invited to participate in the top flight based on various criteria in addition to league performance. Based on this criteria Donegal Celtic were excluded even though they finished several places above Bangor, who will be involved in the new Irish Premiership. This is because Bangor managed to do a better job of satisfying the off-field criteria (finance, infrastructure, business planning, personnel, attendances) and therefore placed 12th, above Donegal Celtic, in the final rankings.

Despite the fact that Donegal Celtic (winners of the Reserve League and Irish League Paintball Challenge) were as aware of these criteria as everyone else, despite their awful ground, despite their poor attendance all season and despite the fact that it was public knowledge that they were ranked 12th at the start of the season (up from an original ranking of 17th following an appeal, with 12 teams qualifying for the new IFA Premiership) they were surprised that they ended up being one of five Premier League clubs who failed to gain entry to next year's IFA Premiership.

They made an appeal, which was due to be heard today, but this has been postponed to give the club time to study the detailed breakdown of the scores (awarded by independent parties) which they had asked for and have now been given.

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