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New FIDE Arbiters confirmed

The December 2023 FIDE Congress has approved the applications of three new Irish arbiters who should now soon receive their FIDE Arbiter certificates,

Ireland needs more FIDE Arbiters so it is good to report that of the seven people who passed the exam at the last arbiter seminar held by the ICU, three have now completed their qualification. (One of the seven was Scottish.)

One of those who passed, John Loughran, was deputy chief arbiter at the 2023 Irish Senior Championships last summer. The other two are Andrew O'Brien and Yuriy Petrenko who is from the Ukraine.

SInce Covid, it is good to see that several new National Arbiters have qualified and been licensed with FIDE , but they are all male.

We urgently need female arbiters now.

Ireland's hosting of the European schools event in Limerick next May probably means that we shall need most of our arbiters involved and will have to borrow arbiters from abroad especially for the girls' events.

The first stage towards becomning a FIDE Arbiter is to earn the National Arbiter title. Unfortunately the NA seminar that was planned for early December had to be oostponed (we are not sure why) but hope it can be held early in 2024.

The current (December 2023) list of active licensed arbiters for Ireland is as follows, ordered first by title and then alphabetically. (Arbiters described by FIDE as inactive are not included.)

International Arbiters: Gerry Graham, Ted Jennings.

FIDE Arbiters: Ivan Baburin, Tim D. Harding, Rory Delaney, Paul McKeown, John McMorrow, Pete Morriss, Andrew O Brien, Colm O Muireagain, Yuriy Petrenko, Ruth Redmond, Brian Scully. (One or two of these are resident in the UK.)

National Arbiters: Vincent Bissett, Adrian Dornford-Smith, Christoper Forrian, Conor Dunne, Pat Fitzsimons, James Forde, Richard Gould, Ross Harris, Brendan Jamison, Zsolt Kardkovacs, Edward Khanzarov, Andrew Kildea, Neal Kirby, Damien Lavery, Gabriel Mirza, Mark Newman, Vjekoslav Novak, Kevin O'Flaherty, Adam Rushe, Pat Scanlan, Herbert Scarry, Peter Scott, Stephen Short, Ronan Sutton, Pat Twomey, Mark R. Watkins, and Henry Williams.

There is more information for arbiters on Tim's personal arbiter page.

Back to our main page of Irish chess news.

For further information on Irish chess, including ratings, how to join, a tournament calendar and a list of officials, please see the Irish Chess Union website.