Had an interesting one today, one of the company’s that I do a lot of consultancy work for have an ‘all Ireland’ presence. They are part of a global franchise of said company. However, after setting up their business in the Republic of Ireland, they are now starting to expand into the last part of their territory in the North of Ireland. This posed an interesting problem for them. I was assuming that we would just set up everyone in the North with a .ie mail address, however, this has caused some problems and unease amongst some of the people concerned. I suppose when I sit back and look at this, its understandable.

I cannot simply go and register the .co.uk equivalant of the .ie address they currently own, as this belongs to the mainland UK franchise. As they operate as two totally seperate franchises, we cannot simply ask the company in England to let us use some .co.uk addresses and ask them to manage them for us, so where does that leave us?

Well, I see 3 options, 1) leave them using the .ie addresses which is technically the simplest fix, but politically probably the most difficult. 2) register a .com address, which breaks with worldwide company policy and is therefore not really feasable; 3) register the companyni.co.uk or companynorthernireland.co.uk address, which currently seems to be the best middle ground. This would seem to be the solution that I will go with. I have never registered a .co.uk domain for use in Ireland, so I’m going to have to research the process for registering .co.uk domains. From what I see, it’s no more difficul than registering a .com, and certianly not as difficult as setting up a .ie.