Top Issue 1-2024

18 December 1997 Edition

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Are you connected?

Bill Delaney praises republicans for their professional use of the Internet

You know you can't ignore them forever - those bizarre http://www.acme.com/ codes are appearing, writ large and subliminally small, on everything, everywhere, even on your favourite political weekly. It's true - the `Net is here and is out to get you connected.

If - and it's no small if - you get all the software and hardware properly installed and get your internet provider to behave, your first internet sensation will be a dizzy feeling of directionlessness. The cure is visit http://www.yahoo.com. This is the internet address for the Yahoo! directory, the only sensible attempt to organise the huge amount of information now online - already more than all of the world's printed matter.

The next thing you will discover is that the Americans have pretty much taken over. This is due in part to the fact that their telephone companies provide flat-rate local phone access. European governments haven't yet figured out that the superhighway is a journey too far if there is a toll on every little boreen en route.

The internet - originally conceived by US military boffins as a bomb-proof intelligence network, capable of circumventing any damage - has all but ended censorship in the western world. Information online is automatically available everywhere by any of thousands of routes, so efforts to stem the flow are pretty much doomed to fail.

In characteristic internet fashion, Irish Republican internet activity started when Irish political science academics banned Republican news items from their e-mail internet facility. Eugene McElroy of New Jersey, USA then simply started another Irish news and discussion list open to all points of view.

Later, for no good reason, online Irish Republican activism took hold in Austin, Texas. Despite some despairing efforts at censorship by the British establishment and the mainstream media, online activists in Ireland and across the world have since played a part in ending the marginalisation of Republicanism.

Republican web sites have multiplied since the An Phoblacht site (http://irlnet.com/aprn) went online almost three years ago, followed shortly after by the Sinn Fein site (http://sinnfein.ie). These two sites have proven to be easily the two most popular Irish political web sites, reaching well over ten thousand people every week. Other sites of interest are the Saoirse site (http://irlnet.com/saoirse) and Irish Northern Aid (http://inac.org), but of course there are considerably more Republican web sites, mailing lists and discussion forums than can be listed here.

There is an extraordinary amount of Irish news online now - of the newspapers, the Irish Times Web site is the biggest, thanks to ``generous'' government grants. Every Irish daily newspaper and most of the weeklies are now on the web, all free. Meanwhile, the Belfast Telegraph claims to be ``the most popular in Northern Ireland'', although this seems a little suspicious as even its own figures indicate it has less than one third the readership of An Phoblacht.

In this small article you couldn't begin to describe the material available - but if you can conceive of it, it's out there somewhere, and if it's not, maybe you should put it online yourself...

If you have hours to spend, you can lose yourself to the internet - but I don't recommend it. Better to spend some time looking around, mark a few items of interest and forget the rest until you need to go exploring again. But if you're on the net, you know if you drop by An Phoblacht, you're home.

An Phoblacht
44 Parnell Sq.
Dublin 1
Ireland