Over the last few months there has been a lot of “talk” about building a knowledge economy and promoting Irish jobs etc etc.
So this lunchtime I thought I’d have a quick look at what the main Irish political parties are actually doing ie. are they walking the walk?
The methodology I used was pretty simple – I used the DNS for their main site ie. www.partyname.tld (most of them use .ie). In some cases the DNS resolved to an IP address, whereas in others it was a CNAME or pointer.
I only looked at the main political parties and their main websites. I did not look at secondary sites, local sites, individual politicians sites or where their email was routed.
Using a bit of dns lookups I was able to quickly ascertain that the only big Irish political party to host in Ireland at the moment is Fine Gael.
Fianna Fail host their website in the US. They used to host in Ireland but switched to the US “temporarily” over 18 months ago. They obviously haven’t switched back.
Labour‘s site is hosted in the UK.
The Green Party‘s site is with a Norwegian host in the UK.
Sinn Fein host in the US.
A lot of the smaller parties, such as The Socialist Workers Party, host in Ireland. The Pirate Party host in France.
If they were to host their websites in Ireland it wouldn’t create hundreds of jobs. But it would show that they at least were going to lead by example and “walk the walk”.
(and I obviously do have a vested interest, but that’s hardly the point.. )
UPDATE: Green Party’s site is in the UK with a Norwegian host.
It boils down to the Irish ISP market being uncompetitive. You can blame the Irish Government for some of it, taxation is way too high here. However there is a fundamental issue with Irish providers, whether Hosting, or Service. They charge way over the odds for the service they deliver.
For the equivalent of 45 Euro/year you can get a domain name, unlimited email addresses, unlimited sub-domains, unlimited storage space, unlimited email storage space, and unlimited website traffic. You get the idea.
When the Irish market can match the products of the competition then you’ll find more customers coming your way.
Well done to Fine Gael for hosting the site in Ireland.
Oh, wait a second, is that the site they plagiarised from a UK broadcaster via a designer in Russia?
Hmmmm.