Reviewing the Websites of the various political parties on this island presents two big problems: finding them and reading them. Finding them requires guesswork and a little help from Yahoo!, but reading them requires lots of strong coffee, plenty of breaks for air, and matchsticks to prop open the eyes. They're not the most stimulating sites on the Web.
Finding them can be difficult because, strangely, not all parties have registered their own domain names yet, and the ones who have chose domains according to ideology. While Fianna Fail, Labour, the SDLP and Sinn Fein are firmly planted in the Irish .ie domain, Fine Gael has chosen the international .com domain, feeding rumours that the country's second-largest party is merely the local branch of a multinational company. Meanwhile, north of the Border the DUP's fears of a sell-out are confirmed, as it is the sole unionist party in the .uk domain. The UUP, UDP and PUP have all opted instead to live in the international .org domain. The northern parties, Sinn Fein excepted, are also more finger-friendly, allowing us to type party acronyms rather than full names.
Judging the sites is a bit like judging ice skating: there's a big difference between artistic impression and technical merit. Artistic impression points are awarded for style: using links, Java applets, graphics, pictures, sounds, and video clips to dress up punchy information. Technical merit points are awarded for the information content: it should be comprehensive and immediate, constantly updated to avoid going stale, with plenty of external links. It should merit a return visit. Thus there are no marks for filling a Website with wordy manifestos and speeches, forgetting the short attention spans of surfers.
A tour of the main parties' sites earlier this month showed that while all are maintaining sites, some are Web masters while others are, well, better at the day job.
Eoin Licken is at elicken@irish-times.ie