OpenWriters.org

Jackie Healy-Rae led the charge. Providing enough ammunition for the urban snobs to scoff at culchies well into the next decade, he proudly declared his stance against reducing thce drink drive limit. At 50 milligrams the new regulations will mean that a single pint would pit you against the garda's breathalyser in a game you were sure to lose. Tackle the boy racers, tackle the speedsters, tackle everyone but me - let me hop behind...

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Dermot Ahern, the Irish Justice minister is to introduce a law that will make blasphemy a legally punishable offense in Ireland with fines of up to €100,000 as reported in the Irish Times. At a time when Ireland is struggling to build credibility in the international community, this latest move by Fianna Fail is set to make a laughing stock out of the country, projecting an image of a draconian backwater state turning to God...

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Ryan Carson and the Carsonified team jetted in to Dublin to show the software enthusiasts and developers of Ireland something they had been missing for a long time. A world class event that spanned the breath of the web development sector - designers, coders and pretty much every true-hearted techie alike - that produced a turnout which made those present realise just how much diversity and interesting development is going on in Ireland. There was...

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The music and film distribution industries are in crisis; 20 years ago, they were needed because mass distribution of media was otherwise impossible, but today their service is no longer useful or necessary. So why should we start censoring the Internet because of their failure to adapt their business models? Imagine if high cost airlines had asked for Internet Censorship because Ryanair was taking all their business by flying people to Europe for a fiver.In...

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Ireland is set to become one of the first EU countries to lose access to a democratic Internet as Eircom is about to start filtering the packets of data that are carried by its network and begin blocking access to certain sites based on the claims of Sony-BMG, Universal and Warner and EMI. These four mega corps have banded together under the Irish sounding moniker of IRMA (the Irish Recorded Music Association). IRMA plan to...

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Chris Mellor's recent article on Channelregister.co.uk concerning Dell's Limerick manufacturing exodus covered various reasons for Dell's decision. Many of these break no new ground - it is simply the economics of the situation Dell finds itself in. But there were some subtleties that he unearthed that haven't been stated by many commentators. Firstly, had there been sufficient demand for the notebooks that Dell were producing, then it would have taken both the Irish and Polish...

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