Archive for February, 2006

Overseas learners will save the Irish language?

Monday, February 13th, 2006

Item: More than 322 different languages are (known to be) spoken in the United States. Item: The Irish language is in 66th place, with 25,870 people able to speak it, and it is spoken (able to be spoken?) in each of the 50 states. Item: The Irish Minister for the Gaeltacht sees ...

NBC to launch Eurovision not-so-clone

Monday, February 13th, 2006

NBC plans to launch a 'Eurovision-style' contest, with the winner gaining a recording contract. Funny thing is, the Eurovision song contest is actually won by a songwriter, not by a performer. So the '50 states, 50 entrants' thing is kind of like the Eurovision, but the concentration on performers rather ...

Intergenerational justice in Ireland

Friday, February 10th, 2006

The Irish Labour Party has published what sounds like an interesting proposed constitutional referendum, relating to protection of cultural heritage:The Labour Party has published a Bill, introduced into the Dáil by Party President Michael D Higgins, which will protect cultural heritage and also place an ...

Robots.txt and irlgov.ie

Thursday, February 9th, 2006

Over at Gavin's Blog there's an interesting observation about the robots.txt file at www.irlgov.ie. Now, robots.txt files are not something I'm given to browsing on an ongoing basis, but there do seem to be some strange items on the ignore list - specifically, several documents that no longer appear on ...

No Irish visa for Internet bride

Monday, February 6th, 2006

This story from tomorrow's Irish Times points to a whole pile of interesting ethical issues:A divorced Irish man who married a woman from Ghana whom he met over the internet has brought a High Court challenge to the refusal of the Minister for Justice to permit his new wife entry ...

2002 census – the answer

Monday, February 6th, 2006

Have I mentioned my admiration for the Irish CSO? Yesterday I posted a question about the date of the last Irish census, and simultaneously sent a query to the CSO's standard email address. When I got up this morning - by 3pm Irish time - I had a response. First, the ...

DVB in Ireland – input requested

Sunday, February 5th, 2006

As hinted at back at the start of January, I'm currently working on a response to Comreg's consultation/proposal on regional DVB in Ireland. Submissions are due by Thursday (specifically 5pm GMT/11am Urbana time), so I hope to get a working draft out in the next day or so. The plan ...

Owning information

Sunday, February 5th, 2006

Each morning, six days a week, I get a mail from The Irish Times, with information about the stories appearing in that day's paper. At the end of the email is a copyright notice, which reads in part:Articles and information appearing in The Irish Times News Digest are owned by ...

Census question

Sunday, February 5th, 2006

I've vague memories of heading this issue being raised back in 2001 or 2002, but can't remember the detail of the discussion, so here goes: The Irish census is generally held in years ending in a 1 or 6. From 1841 - the pre-Famine census that showed an all-island population of ...

Religion in Irish schools

Sunday, February 5th, 2006

Several groups have recently called for changes in the manner in which the Irish school system is structured - first the Irish Principal's Network, and then on Friday, Pat Rabbitte in an article in the Irish Independent. As Rabbitte notes:More than 90 per cent of primary schools are run by ...