Irish and Celtic Thingies
Resources

Most recently modified on $Date: 2008/01/23 02:48:17 $ (UT)

RESOURCES (INTERNET AND OTHERWISE)

IrishNet

August 25, 1996: From the same people who brought you Ceolas, comes a new initiative: IrishNet: a directory of Irish resources and organisations in America. This looks to be one of the most comprehensive resource I've found in a long time. To quote from their about page:

... to use the internet to bridge the gap between Irish people and Irish-related organisations abroad, which so often a hard time finding each other.

E-Search

Irish and related sites on the Web

This section probably needs updating; I just don't have the time anymore to do much web crawling. And, as I said earlier, I am not an Irish yahoo!

(June 28, 1999). Fiddler's Green is a place you know well... or should. No, not the one where Fishermen go if they don't go to .... but (to quote its author) "A site dedicated to Ireland, Irish Culture, and the Irish Presence in Newfoundland". Very interesting reading, nicely ordered links (something I could learn a lesson from!), good content on the Newfoundland history and Irish connection, and a talented artist behind it all.

(July 7, 1998: Resources) I've been meaning to make reference of Alica Kehoe's (dual-homed) work on the web for some time now; I've had a link on my home page for some time but not here (shame on me). She recently split the Irish resources off into their own page. Lots of interesting goodies there! For those who've been around the net a while, you might be interested to know that Alice has a rather famous son: Brendan, of Zen and the Art of the Internet fame.

(January 31, 1997: Resources; updated Feb. 5, 2000) One of the most common questions I got in the early days of this page was help in tracing one's ancestors. Now there's The Irish Ancestral Research Association based in Boston; they're non-profit, non-political, and have a nicely assembled set of web pages.

A good starting point for Irish web pages is Ger Mulcahy's map (Ger is at the Computer Centre, UCD). A list of Irish Servers was maintained by Liam Relihan (who moved to New Jersey [njit] a few years ago, then moved back) at the University of Limerick which details many web servers in Ireland.

Joe Desbonnet, formerly (?) of University College Galway, started deploying a wombat web server back in the mid 1990's, and apparently it's now gone commercial. It still has just about anything you'd want to know about Galway, including a Complete Guide To Galway. Alas, the weather system formerly operated by Joe called Odie seems to have disappeared (or been renamed) so I had to zap my link to his weather image page.

Shawn Mehan was one of the first webmasters to create a very comprehensive set of Gaelic web pages. These (and mirror copies of the audio files from our former RTÉ to Everywhere experiment) were set up on the SunSite server (now metalab) at UNC. Shawn has since moved on to better things; I believe he's still at Sabhal Mór Ostaig (SMO) in the Western Scottish Highlands.

(Updated October 7, 2002) It's not strictly Irish or Celtic, but the Dual Citizenship FAQ is a very useful resource compiled by Rich Wales. He's not a lawyer, but he knows more than a little something about the topic. Plus, he runs FreeBSD, an open source operating system for Intel and other systems based on Berkeley Unix (like Linux, only different!)...

FTP Internet sites

I've deleted this section; the ftp protocol has mostly been subsumed by the web, though it was enough of a distinct system back in 1993 when these pages were created to merit a separate section. Besides, all the resources I had in here were either no longer present or duplicated on other web servers.

Mailing Lists (listservs, majordomos, etc)

There are several mailing lists that are of interest too, including the following. They come from the National Information Server on the listserv.hea.ie host. As far as I know, they all have policies against commercial "spamming" so dont' even think of trying... The links get you to the archives of these lists if any.

There are more lists than what I present here (e.g. UCCORK-L, DUBLIN, IRSAINFO, ...) but as I tend to think highly of those that promote the celtic languages and culture, that's mostly what I show here.

• CELTIC-L, the Celtic Culture discussion group; tends to be a bit more scholarly than its Usenet equivalent.
• GAELIC-L, discussion, education in Irish and Scottish Gaelic and Manx (i.e., q-celtic). Is féidir leat scríobh i nGaeilge anseo.
• GAEILGE-A, "comhrá i nGaeilge na hÉireann" (Conversation in Irish).
• GAEILGE-B, a list specifically for people learning Irish.
• GAELG, a list for the Manx Gaelic Language.
• GAIDHLIG-A, Comhradh ann an Gaidhlig na h-Albann (Conversation in Scottish Gaelic).
• GAIDHLIG-B, as with GAEILGE-B, a list for beginners to Scottish Gaelic.
• IAC-L Irish Academic Computing. This is a really quiet list. Too bad. In fact it's so quiet I think it's dead, or perhaps failed to survive the move from 'irlearn' to 'hea'...
• IRL-NET Supposedly issues related to research in Ireland, but it's fairly quiet. No logs/archives either. And maybe it's dead too.
• IRL-POL Discussion, often heated, about Irish Politics. May have been semi-abandoned? The web page indicated less than 30 subscribers when I checked in June 1997. It had 4 when I checked in March 1999, and the last archived posting is dated March 14, 1997. I think this one's either dead or no longer archived.
• IRTRAD-L, discussion of Irish Traditional Music, non-moderated. Unlike some of the abovementioned lists, this one is alive and well with over 500 subscribers (as of March 1999).
• WELSH-L for p-celtic languages: Welsh, Cornish, Breton.

To subscribe to any of the above (say you want CELTIC-L), send a one-line email to listserv@listserv.hea.ie with the line:

subscribe celtic-l Bilbo Baggins

except substitute your real name (not your email address) for "Bilbo Baggins". Send a single-word message HELP to the listserv address for more details.

Many of these can be set to digest mode; this may be handy for the high volume lists.By giving the command -- in an email message to the listserv address (see above) -- e.g., SET GAELIC-L DIGEST you can receive the lists in a daily digest as opposed to having them trickle in one at a time. You need to subscribe to the list first of course.

Other Selected Mailing Lists

Note: By using the email addresses as presented here, you agree to respect the wishes, rights, and preferences of the owners, administrators, and list members. Don't spam them or the curse of Mary Murphy will be on you... (look at the end of that page). Also, I haven't checked whether these lists are alive or not; updates on their status would be appreciated if you happen to know; drop me a note if you know about them.

• (November 22, 1996) JIM. Who, you may ask? JIM as in Just Irish Music. This is a mailing list with a heavy web emphasis. To subscribe, send a message to majordomo@majordomo.pobox.com with subscribe jim in the body of the message. For more details, see their web page. (Be warned; it's over 500 kbytes!
• celtling The Celtic Linguist list. Contact: acarnie@mit.edu (Andrew H. Carnie) to subscribe. This is a private list for discussion of theoretical linguistics. Only.
• irish-studies. Contact: mdurkan1@cc.swarthmore.edu (Michael Durkan). Subscribe: listserv@cc.swarthmore.edu.
• gaelic-m Same as gaelic-l above but with Mime support. Contact: kelley@ede.sanders.lockheed.com (Seán Kelley).
• The Irish Soccer Mailing List is run by thomas@maths.tcd.ie (Thomas Bridge). Drop him a line if you wish to get on the list.
• The Cornish Studies list. Subscribe by sending an email message to Majordomo@coombs.anu.edu.au, including in the body of the message:
  subscribe Cornish-studies-l yourname@your.address.here (Thanks to Seán Kelley for the info).

Usenet Resources

• rec.music.celtic; I used to post the Thistle & Shamrock list there about every two weeks, but I stopped that years ago. Why? Partly due to losing faith in UseNet in general, partly because I perceived it was not worth the effort; most people got the information from the web page.

• soc.culture.celtic; also known as s.c.c.. Someone once said "This is where the Irish guys hang out" (guys used generically here). That was before it split asunder (see below). Lots of interesting discussion and flame wars. Here's the FAQ (from sunsite.unc.edu; also available at rtfm.mit.edu)

• Years ago, s.c.c. split asunder into soc.culture.irish, soc.culture.scottish, soc.culture.welsh, soc.culture.cornish, and soc.culture.breton (no Manx, even after 4 years). I can't help wondering if we had created talk.politics.ireland if that would have been a saner way for the groups to evolve. I wasn't the only one who felt this way, but I was unable to spend as much time and energy on agitating for such a newsgroup as I wanted to. I don't read Usenet much anymore, mostly due to lack of time (and often amazingly low signal/noise ratio).

• For those of you interested in it, there's alt.scottish.clans.

• If you want to trace your roots, check out soc.genealogy.uk+ireland.

• Some of you will have access to a news feed that carries the ie.* hierarchy; I know Virginia Tech does, as does Cornerstone Networks in Charlottesville. These include ie.general, ie.jobs, and others. Many of them are fairly quiet.

No doubt there are more by the time you read this.

Other Resources

The Irish Social and Information Club of Atlanta (aka "The Irish Club of Atlanta") represent about 150 members, most of whom are recent immigrants from Ireland. The purpose of the club is as a self-help society to help each other get started in Atlanta through job contacts, advice on Apartments, Banks, cars, etc. Of course, they get together several times a month just for a few brews too! (No, I'm not a member; 450 miles is a bit too much of a commute :-)

There's a cable channel available in the US called CelticVision. Unfortunately, it's not widely available and in fact vanished for a while in the late 1990's. When I checked in March 1999, the page just said "Please visit us next month when the site will be ready". Pulling down the view info menu item from my browser showed the page was most recently modified in December 1998. Anyone out there know what's up?

The Calendar of Events in Ireland as issued by Liam Ferrie, is available from the Irish Emigrant.