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]](http://republican-news.org/graphics/title_gifs/aprn.gif)