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When it's that time of year...

Every year, without fail, the web hits on the following two pages go through the roof (relatively speaking) around February and March. I can't imagine why :-)

Irish Phrases that drive me NUTS!

Irish Stew: Back in 1995, I threw together a web page with a recipe for this, based on a usenet post from Fiona Hyland. It's still there, though the link to Fiona's recipe pages is now stale; I can't find where she's gone :-(. But the stew... Yum! Forget about your corned beef and cabbage (ewww); this is much better!

Irish and Celtic Passages

In my copious (HAH!) spare time, I try to maintain a web page called Irish and Celtic Thingies (and no, I don't remember why I called it that; I must have been low on inspiration that day). This was originally on my local test server at NRAO, then for 5 years it was hosted on the Ceolas web site run by Gerard Manning, with a mirror on Cornerstone Networks in Charlottesville (I think that's still there, though I don't have access to it anymore so it's VERY stale). For quite some time it was also mirrored on Matt Mead's goof.com, but now it lives here on my own domain.

From 1993 through about 2003, I was caretaker of the Thistle and Shamrock NPR Stations list. This was a fairly comprehensive list of all National Public Radio (NPR) stations that carry this program of Irish, Scottish and other Celtic music hosted by Fiona Ritchie. At the time of inception, there was no other way of finding this information online. Now, fortunately, the T&S show has its own web site.

Here's an old Travelogue of my vacation (holidays, holliers) in Ireland in 1996. It only covers the first 4 days; I never got around to finishing it.

Radio Teilifís Éireann (RTE, the Irish National Radio and Television Station) has a good online presence. They were one of the first to automatically provide daily news shows in an audio format suitable for the net, and one of the first to have live feeds (for both Radio 1 and 2FM). However, they did have some prodding :-) in the form of an interesting experiment in the early days of the web. That experiment shut down long ago, but it sure was fun while it lasted. It's interesting in its later days that the open source part of the experiment proved to be more reliable than the proprietary part.
RTE News is one of the best sources of news (see next item for another) if you really want to know what's going on in Ireland. They also have Aertel Teletext, a service updated every half an hour or so, provides very current news from Ireland in a very low-bandwidth form (it looks a bit "retro" these days).

The Irish Times (part of Ireland.COM). Real news about Ireland from the source. Warning: some of their content is only accessible via a paid subscription; fortunately, their cool weather webcam overlooking O'Connell Bridge in Dublin is free :-).

I'd be lax if I didn't mention Liam Ferrie's Irish Emigrant. Started as an informal e-mail newsletter sometime around 1990 (or before?) by a volunteer in what was then the DEC plant in Galway, and when I discovered it in the early 1990's it was like a lifeline; finally, good honest, solid, accurate news on a weekly basis from Ireland!!! (Remember, the web back then was a few machines at CERN and text-only browsers; we're talking pre-firefox, pre-IE, pre-mosaic here). Anyway, Liam's efforts have grown into a truly wonderful resource.

The Republic of Ireland Constitution (In Irish: Bunreacht na hÉireann).