Dec
8

Irish 1901 and 1911 Census Records to go Online

Just read this post which brings me to one of the biggest gripes I have about Crown copyright here in England.

Whilst we have to pay for access to the 1901 cencus records, Ireland are doing the right thing and providing it free. Also the 100 year rule does not seem to apply and so they will have access to the 1911 cencus before we do!

My gripe about paying for the 1901 cencus records is that the data was collected by taxpayer’s money and has been made available online by the taxpayer’s money. Crown copyright ensures that us the taxpayer’s have no rights to any government data unless they want us to!

In the case where a commercial company uses the data to provide a service, then they have a right to charge for the additional services provided BUT the data should be collectively ours (a commercial model used in the old shareware world). Instead the government is becoming a huge business whose assets where paid for by the taxpayer (a bit like the BBC’s commecial services). How much of this cash is being used to reduce our tax bills?

Now having had my gripe, I will sign off for today.

Cheers

Posted by Benny Genealogy Subscribe to RSS feed

2 Responses to “Irish 1901 and 1911 Census Records to go Online”

  1. david says:
    19 December, 2005 at 9:59 pm

    benny, an exception was made to the 100-year rule by the irish government after independence because there was no other complete earlier census available and the data was required for a multitude of civic reasons, least of all genealogy …

    and you may note that the irish government is not doing the work, the canadian governemnt is …

    all irish data available on the internet hs been done by anyone except the irish governement who spent millions supposedly indexing all church records which are still not available free to public – you have to pay a small ransom to self-preserving local research groups for this data … except DUBLIN whose data was such a mess due to total lack of quality control that it still cannot be used

    i know the inside story because a friend of mine worked on the project

    how i wish those church records (for better or worse) were online …

    moan, moan, moan …

    regards, david

  2. Benny says:
    20 December, 2005 at 4:36 pm

    David,

    Are you saying that the church records have not been indexed by familysearch.org?
    I thought thay have done quite a bit around europe and they do include Ireland
    (under the British Isles) in there search drop downs. May be worth a try.

    Cheers

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