Irish and Celtic thingies (C) P. Murphy 1995-1999, 2003, 2005

The above are the Irish [Republic of Ireland], Scottish, Welsh, Breton,
Cornish, Galician, Manx, and Northern Irish [similar to Ulster;
latter just has the red hand] flags respectively.
Thanks to those of you who donated all but the Irish one.

Most recently modified on $Date: 2009/01/18 04:28:08 $ (GMT)
Added link for "Re-Imagining Ireland" Conference in Charlottesville, Virginia, May 2003 (I work in C'ville).
Burned my gifs, using png format instead (png's not gif).

Items in emphasized text are within this page; others are links to separate pages.

Peace NOW

These first two images on either side (the logo and the likeness of a dove), were an outcome of the sadness, frustration, anger, etc. that I and others (specifically, Seán McCoy) felt at the apparent breakdown of the 17-month cease-fire in Northern Ireland back in 1996. With the advent of the "Good Friday" agreement, and the vote by a sizeable majority -- on both sides of the border -- in favour of this document, the future looks very hopeful. The road may be rough (note added Feb 21, 2005: yup, it sure has been), but it'll bring us in the right direction.

Please feel free to download either or both of them (in most browsers, shift-click on the images or where it says "[Download...]" above if you have a non-image browser) and put it or them on your web pages to show your support for peace in Northern Ireland, and for the agreement.

Seán redesigned the logo (March 1999) so please feel free to update any page on which you put the original logo.

The white ribbon on the left comes from the Northern Ireland Information Centre (see below) and is one of at least two different ribbon campaigns under way.

The Final image is on the right is from the White Ribbon for Peace in Ireland campaign, organised by Shane Aherne in Ireland some years ago. Unfortunately, I've lost contact with Shane, and his website (formerly at www.pointguide.com/peace/) has vanished; search engines haven't helped me locate him since (Shane, if you're still out there and have a web presence, let me know!) It doesn't matter where you get a white ribbon logo; the important thing is to support peace now, and from now on, in Ireland, North and South. It can and will happen, it may in fact be happening now, and it must be made to last.

On March 13, 1997, Senator George Mitchell in his speech to the America-Ireland Fund Dinner in Washington, D.C., asked all Irish Americans to "Denounce violence in Northern Ireland". He also urged us to make the following statements (which I agree wholeheartedly with):

Since I first put this page on the web 12 years ago (in 1993!), I've received thousands of messages in support of the cause of Peace from people all over the world (thank you all!), and only three (3) from a person who disagreed [I believe it was the same person; the arguments and style were identical]. This person thought the London bombing campaign and "killing brits" was a good idea. The mind boggles. :-( This was from someone at a US address too, someone who obviously could not equate the horrors experienced by people in the former Federal Building in Oklahoma City with what was going on in Ireland and the UK. Furthermore they didn't seem to have a clue about the real situation, or the fact that "brits out" if applied literally to Northern Ireland would mean ethnic cleansing on a scale that would make Bosnia or Kosovo look like a picnic (You know who you are; I've told you twice: do not write to me or harrass me again. Read my disclaimer below).

NOTE: what is presented here is historic in nature. Pay attention to the dates! Things have changed a lot over the past 10 years, notably with respect to the Peace Process, and the committment of Sinn Féin thereto. It's my opinion that this party has a ways to go before they're on a par with, say, Fine Gael or the SDLP, but the party that I see today (at least as of February 2005) is a far cry from the small, extremist factional party I remember from the 1970s through the mid-1990s.

An opinion poll in the Sunday Tribune (a Dublin paper) on June 9, 1996 showed over 97% of people in Northern Ireland wanted the IRA to restore the ceasefire. Of the Sinn Féin supporters canvassed, 84% wanted a new ceasefire. It's finally here, and it may be that a permanent peaceful solution is at hand, but both were long overdue. My source on these figures is a report I read on Aertel, the teletext news service operated by RTE, the Irish National Broadcasting Company.

Most of you reading this know it already, but I feel the need to reiterate the results of the Referendum of Friday, May 22, 1998:

	NORTH		SOUTH		TOTAL
Yes:	71.12%	(676,952)	94.4%	(1,442,583)	85.5%	(2,119,535)
No:	28.88%	(274,893)	5.6%	(85,748)	14.5%	(360,641)

The turnout in the North was 81% (yes, that means over 4 out of every 5 eligible voters showed up and voted!) I obtained these figures from Liam Ferrie's Irish Emigrant electronic newsletter. They speak for themselves.

On my now not-so-recent (June 1996) 2-week holiday in Ireland (playing tourist and also visiting parents and relatives), I was quite encouraged to see many window and bumper stickers in/on cars stating "I'm for Peace". Unfortunately I never saw any for sale in the shops we stopped at. There was a huge groundswell of public support in the Republic for a reinstatement of the ceasefire; thanfully it's now here.

This page is dedicated to all who work for peace, and also to the memory of Veronica Guerin. May her efforts and work be remembered always.

Please support free speech on the net. (But note that postage due spam is not free "speach"; my spam fighting credentials have been graphically documented!)

DISCLAIMER

This page is my creation, and as such reflects my whims, moods, and views on what is important, fun, interesting and so on. It will never be a total reference for what is "out there" on the web that is in any way, shape, or form related to things Irish or Celtic. At one point this page may have fulfilled that role, but there's just too much stuff out there anymore. I'm no Irish Yahoo, y'know... (nor an AltaVista, Google, Lycos, WebCrawler, or any other compendium or search engine). There will inevitably be some material that I will not include because either I don't like it or think it's inappropriate or incompatible with my views (said views being decidedly moderate, so don't panic).

If you want to suggest a possible addition to this page, one that has some real content (other than advertising something, or being a list of links to other lists of links), then please contact me. Alternately, my work page has non-electronic contact information where you can reach me.

I pay very little attention to fancy backgrounds, flashing or overly bright colours, or other bells and whistles that do nothing to enhance the content of a web page. I don't like frames; they get in the way of content and confuse navigation for the user. I read web pages via different browsers on a variety of systems (mostly mozilla on Linux) so active-x, shockwave, and many other so-called enhancements are ignored.

I refuse to accept any unsolicited bulk or commercial email (UCE/UBE, "spam") now or at anytime in the future, at any of my email addresses. I'm extremely pro-active on whatever spam makes it past my industrial strength procmail filter rules. See above for my conditions and terms for queries.

Please do NOT ask for help with the following: tartans, your family tree, translations, pointers, where to find some music, help with your homework, or the like; much as I would like to help all of you, there's only one of me and I just don't have the time to answer everyone. Also please don't waste your time and mine with any extremist political rhetoric (on either side); I'm a confirmed moderate (with a tendency to lean towards the liberal side of things). Attempts to persuade or intimidate me otherwise will be met with polite refusal, and if they persist, will be reported to your provider with a reminder of said provider's acceptable use policy. I do not take abuse.

If you do submit a suggestion for an addition to this page, please bear in mind that my time is very limited; there may be a long delay before I can get back to you or possibly add something here describing it. But if your suggestion has merit, please be patient; I do try to include such ideas!

Finally, you may notice that thre are no e-mail addresses on these pages, other than information on mailing list subscription mechanisms. Spammers now routinely harvest "mailto" links and obvious e-mail addresses in the clear from web pages for their lists (this link is for them). This is irritating but I suppose it was inevitable; they more or less destroyed all un-moderated UseNet newsgroups, so the web was next in their eyes. For people who want to contact me legitimately, follow the Contact info link either here or at the bottom of the page.

Fáilte romhat! ("Welcome" in Irish)

Where am I/Cá bhfuil mé?

You have found your way (perhaps via a maze of twisty little passages) to the Irish and Celtic Thingies page. This page was for a long time kept at two locations: the original on the celtic.stanford.edu site, and a mirror was kept on the cornerstone networks web server (cstone.net).

For near on a decade, it was also available on goof.com along with many other of my pages. At that time, Goof was a PC running FreeBSD (an open source operating system, in many ways like [and unlike!] Linux. Hosting on goof was generously made available by Matt Mead.

I would like to thank Gerard Manning for hosting the page on the Stanford machine for so many years, and to Chris Morris at Cornerstone for the free web space. I tried to never take their generosity for granted; it was always appreciated. (Note: Gerard now runs the Ceolas website, the heir to his celtic.stanford.edu electron microscope!)

What's New

The Irish American Society of Greater Richmond (Virginia) is currently developing a web presence. They are a promoter of Irish Culture and heritage through education and public forums. While I have not attended any of their meetings yet, they're close enough that I might (so watch out for suspicious bearded guys with an Irish accent ;-)...

(January 1, 2003; Good grief, has it really been three and a half years? Apparently...). There's a big (and I do mean big) conference coming to Charlottesville, Virginia this coming May: it's called Re-Imaging Ireland and features a truly impressive list of diginitaries (e.g., Irish President Mary McAleese... Read more in the Odds &Ends section (put there mainly because there's nowhere else; this conference touches most categories here in the Irish & Celtic Thingies!).

(June 28, 1999). Started to clean out my mailbox from the oldest messages. Ack! Found some from 1995!! Needless to say some of the URLs were stale (but a good search engine helps). Anyway, I added an entry on Irish skydiving to the sports page, and a link on Fiddler's Green (in Newfoundland!) to the resources section.

(March 21, 1999). A new logo, a slight rewording of the peace section above. Hopy y'all like the new "peace now" button; Seán McCoy got back in touch with me and spruced it up very nicely.

(Feb 12, 1999: News again). RTÉ have surprised me (pleasantly) once again. I just got through watching the 9 o'clock news -- over my 28.8K modem. Yes, I said watching! See the News section.

(Feb 3, 1999: News). I cleaned up references to the now retired RTÉ to Everywhere experiment, and added a couple of links to some good Irish American publications. Details in the News section.

(Jan 18, 1999: Arts). I can finally watch the Ballykissangel program now that Primestar has added the Beeb (BBC America) to its lineup. More in the Arts section.

(May 25, 1998: everything). I finally bit the bullet and cleared out the old stuff, putting it in the individual pages. Didn't have time to check everything though :-( I did add something in the Science section about an ArchaeoAstronomy conference to be held in Dublin in August, 1998, and a note about a bunch more regional papers in the News section.

(April 23, 1998: news) Wow; another update within a week! Careful, I might set a trend here... The Irish Emigrant will soon be free. Check out the news section.

(April 20, 1998: history and music) I know, I know... it's been way too long since I paid any attention to these pages. Anyway, I have a couple of updates. One is McDatho's Pig in the history section; it now has a companion page for the Táin. The other is a new location for Murphy's Massive Midi page, in the music section.

Copying Restrictions

You are welcome to reference this page by "pointing" at it from your web page(s). You may also down-load this page for your own private use, but you cannot re-publish it on the web, in print, or elsewhere without express permission from me. Re-publishing on the web means exactly what you think it does, i.e. down-loading the file and making it accessible via your web or ftp or other electronic server.

Irish and Celtic Thingies