iTunes comes to Ireland

Unheralded by a fanfare, or even a press release, iTunes has finally opened its doors in Ireland. More than two months after most of Europe was brought in from the cold, and a year and a half after it started up in the US, iTunes' song catalogue is now available for download, if you have an Irish credit card, with practically every one of the 700,000 tracks priced at 99 cent.

Either download the software from the Apple website - or if you have iTunes already, just click on Music Store, then select the Irish store. Remember, it's Mac OS X or Windows 2000/XP only. Or try this link.

Now all Apple has to do is bring the European stores up to par with the US service, which has 300,000 more songs, frequent free downloads and a number of other handy features.