Oft have we spoken of Liam Ferrie's superlatively Irish Emigrant, the email newspaper that condenses everything you want to know about the Emerald Isle and/or Tiger into 9,000 or so words on-screen weekly, along with Pauline Ferrie's Irish Emigrant Book Review which hits our cybermat once a month as promptly as the bill from the credit card company. With this important difference however: the Ferries venture is still free to academics who subscribe at <ferrie@iol.ie>.
Human memory chips are faulty, and last time we delineated the history of this amenity we mistold it, substituting a background in Galway University for a employment in a wellknown computer firm that went go dtí an mballa ['to the wall' - Ed.]. This time, we let Liam tell his own way: "Today being February 8, 1997, I just had to find an excuse to write to you as this is the tenth anniversary of the first edition of the Irish Emigrant. It was actually with some trepidation that I started out with the following statement.
'"As requested by Rene Aungier and Mike McCrohan in the CELT Notes Conference, I am prepared to try and write a newsletter for a few weeks to see what kind of commitment is needed. I propose to write it on a Sunday evening and will briefly cover the main stories of the week. The main sports results will also be included. I will welcome feed back as to the level of detail and type of news in which you are interested. I have my political biases and will try to suppress them. When I fail to do so I will ignore resultant complaints! Well here goes"-… and I went on to describe the election campaign that was in full swing, the shooting dead of Dominic McGlinchey's wife and Ireland's 17-0 win over England in the rugby international at Lansdowne Road. I hope I am still keeping you informed on developments in Ireland in another ten years and that I enjoy it as much then as I do now.'
Happy 10th, Irish Emigrant, but especially to Pauline, whose reviews are an enormous help for anyone looking for Irish book news at email range. The Emigrant Review consistently offers useful first readings of texts as disparate as Robert Ward's Encyclopaedia of Irish Schools 1500-1800 (Mellen Press 1996) and Rita Ann Higgins's Higher Purchase (Salmon Press). Contact Irish Emigrant, Cathedral Building, Middle Street, Galway, Ireland; tel: 353-91-569158; fax: 353-91-569178; and webpage: http://www.iol.ie/emigrant/