GENIRE-L Archives

Archiver > GENIRE > 1999-07 > 0932576909


From: John Raymond <>
Subject: Re: Refund of search fees
Date: Wed, 21 Jul 1999 10:08:29 -0700


Dennis wrote:
> That's interesting. Not to disparage them any more than necessary,
> but before we did the survey, Clare was perhaps the one most often
> referred to in complaints on soc.genealogy.ireland. It was not
> surprising therefore, that they got a barely passable grade in the
> survey.

That's surprising. Clare is minister in charge Ms Síle De Valera's
own consituency. If she can't even get it right in Clare, then God
help us all! Another poster to this general thread could not have
been more right when she said - only the squeeky wheel gets greased.

Whilst every message sent to this list or to any other RootsWeb list
is archived and searchable online by any ministerial staffer or any
journalist, by entering GENIRE and then a search string such as
"Heritage" at: http://searches.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/listsearch.pl
I still reckon carbon copies of complaints re any county Heritage
Centre's operations and their excessive charges, should go to the
minister at her department, and to the opposition Fine Gael party
spokesperson for her portfolio. Of course any such message has more
weight if it comes from an Irish email address <smile>. For a free
one see: http://www.ireland.com/scripts/services/email/reg1.cfm

Copies to the minister and her opposition counterpart can go to:
"Minister Ms Síle de Valera T.D." <>
"Mr Enda Kenny T.D." <>
For those who have't yet broken their addiction, the minister's snail
and a bio is at:http://www.fiannafail.ie/about/whos_who/3bio.htm

It's great to see in the last week a RootsWeb mail list formed for
my own county of interest - County Cavan, and to note despite limited
advertising it has already achieved a large number of subscribers. It
has not even been mentioned yet on the AUSTRALIA list :) 400,000 came
from Ireland to Australia in the 19th century, and despite massive
post war immigration from Europe, about 20% of us 'down under' are
said to still have some Irish roots.

As I said in my initial posting re the excessive prices charged by
these predominently government owned Heritage Centres, as quoted to
me by the one in the total sum of IRE£145 (AUS$290) for only 8 burial
records/incriptions from two C of I churches and their associated
graveyards of which 5 were to be "extracted" from a 1997 manuscript,
the responsible mminister Ms De Valera had "likely simply not
cottoned on yet that the internet has changed the world."

All I can see for these centres is a gradual withering away of their
customer base, as many more databases and sources go up on the web,
other service providers in this area promote and make themselves more
visible, and awareness increases as to the availability of the more
accurate, expeditious, and cost effective alternatives. Ireland has
the opportunity to lead, by consolidating into one web searchable index
database all the induvidual county indexes created as a by-product of
its unemployment relief/youth training scheme, but chooses instead to
maintain by throwing more money at it, an organisation concieved and
before the internet as we know today even came into existance.

In that respect I noted on the AUSTRALIA Mail List this week the
following words, quoted here with the kind permisssion of their
author John Snelson of Southern Cross Genealogy:

"As Larry Ellison of Oracle Corporation says so magnificently ...
"The Internet Changes Everything". Yes, it does, it changes the
way we shop, the way we work, the way we communicate, the way we
think, the way we play, yes and even the way we pray, the way we
bank, the way we order our vegetables and buy our books, the way
we look up phone numbers or find street directions, consult doctors
or go to school, the way we carry out our research into history, the
way we pay our bills and book our holidays, watch movies or trace
our relatives, record our findings and the way we publish the
results of our toil. Trite as though it may be, like all other
groups in the community ... for genealogists using computers and
telecommunications ....... the Internet really does change
everything."

John
Brisbane, Australia

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