Foinse

» see foinse.ie as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

An Irish-language weekly printed in County Kerry for readers in Connemara is about as far from a dial-up line in Turkey as a newspaper gets. I have no memory of Foinse and there is no honest way to claim one. What brought me to it is the ending, which is the strangest afterlife I have found while writing these.

Foinse means source. Pádraig Ó Céidigh published the first issue in October 1996 out of Carraroe in County Galway, with the printing done down in Tralee. It came out every Saturday. It covered the Gaeltacht and the language itself alongside ordinary current affairs and sport, and it carried the week's TG4 listings. There was a section for Leaving Certificate students called Foinse sa Rang and one for children called Foinse Óg, plus a page for adult learners produced with Conradh na Gaeilge.

Writers included Micheál Ó Muircheartaigh and Dáithí Ó Sé, which for a paper of that size is a serious byline list. This was not a hobby sheet run off a photocopier. It was the national Irish-language weekly.

~ the case file ~

~ the funding fight ~

In June 2009 the paper closed. Falling revenue was part of it, but the trigger was a contract. Ó Céidigh and Foras na Gaeilge, the cross-border body that funds Irish-language work, could not agree terms for a new one, and RTÉ reported the closure on 25 June. A minority-language weekly was never going to run on advertising alone, so the contract was the paper.

It came back inside the same year on a model that cut Foras na Gaeilge out entirely. Instead of being sold, it was given away, folded into the Irish Independent every Wednesday. That is how it reached a reported readership of 195,000 in February 2011, a number no paid Irish-language paper had ever seen. It also meant survival now depended on a national English-language daily continuing to want it there.

~ what really happened ~

In September 2013 the publisher, Móinéar Teo, announced that Foinse would be online only from that month. The Wednesday bundle stopped. The website ran on for a while after that and was shut down in 2015, and nobody recorded the day it went, which tells you how quietly it happened.

~ the long tail ~

foinse.ie answers in 2026. Not with a parking page and not with a broker's for-sale template, but with Foinse, laid out as a working news site, in Irish, with an English toggle in the corner. The front page carries a report on the G8 summit in Fermanagh and a David Moyes line about Wayne Rooney. The newest article on it is dated 5 July 2013.

The footer explains what you are looking at. It is an archive of foinse.ie, reconstructed from Internet Archive records, dated 2026. Somebody pulled a dead Irish-language newspaper back out of the Wayback Machine and stood it up again as a site you can actually read. Of the several hundred dead addresses I have checked writing these pages, it is the first one where what waited at the end was a deliberate rebuild rather than a lander or nothing at all.

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