A new report for the Irish championship 2003 has been added to the tournaments pages here. Stephen Brady won for the fourth time, finishing 1½ points clear of the field.
Until this addition, this championship was the most recent for which this site had no report. The problem was that there did not seem quite enough information to compile a full report: the tournament page on the ICU web site gave only final scores, and the ICU games archive gave only 35 games, instead of the roughly 81 that would be expected from those final scores.
The report in The Week In Chess had similar information but also a link to fuller coverage at Dublinchess.com. That link had long since gone stale, but happily the Wayback Machine came to the rescue, and enabled an almost complete reconstruction of the event.
The most interesting game of those available is the wild struggle between Colm Daly and Philip Short from round 3.
From the diagrammed position the game continued 47. Rc8+ Kg7 48. Qxe2 Rxe2 49. Rxa8 Qe4?? (49. … Re1! wins) 50. Rg8+ Kh6 51. a8=Q Re1 52. Qf8+ 1‑0.
I was there watching the game. Poor Philip seen 49…Re1 immediately after he played Qe4 and was shaking after the game and immediately after he resigned he said to Colm…I need a fag…Colm understandably didn’t object