The 2009 Irish championship, described by Peter Cafolla as one of the most enjoyable for years, had a larger-than-usual field of 29 players, featuring all the perennial contenders and in addition IM Mark Quinn, playing for the first time since 1998, and four-time champion John Delaney, playing for the first time since 1991. The highest-rated player was IM Valeri Atlas from Austria (the tournament was open to non-Irish players but they were not eligible for the title of Irish champion).
Colm Daly ended up champion, a clear point ahead of Atlas and Quinn on 7½/9, for his fourth national title, the others being 1998, 1999, and 2005.
A report is now up on the Tournaments page, with 91 of the 123 games. The chess was excellent and entertaining, and it was difficult to trim the selection of interesting games down to a manageable collection. As it is, 20 games are on the shortlist.
[12 November 2011, later: after uploading the first version I played through Cafolla-O’Leary from round 6, a very interesting game that Peter Cafolla annotated on the ICU web site. But the finish of the game as shown in the first version didn’t match, and didn’t seem to make sense. I tracked the problem down to the ICU web site itself, which has two versions of this game, one with notes (number 29422) and one without (number 29493). I had taken the one without notes, as this is easier for the processing routines. But the versions don’t match! Now corrected.]