A brief history of this website

Almost 20 years ago, Ciarán Hinds had his first fan group online, thanks to the new technical possibilities of Yahoo - the "Ciarán Hinds Yahoo board". In the last now almost 20 years, approximately 200 fans subscribed to the board, to read posts, exchange info and chat. "ciaranhinds.com" was the first international authorized fan page run by a Canadian lady, who was the board administrator as well. There were 3 other active fan pages to be found, all run by individual fans. Mainly all closed down in the following years. Then, in 2007-2008, a change occurred. As the community grew, the first administration was not able to cope with the amount of daily requests anymore. News, projects, links, fan admin and posts take a lot of time.

Therefore, the ".com" site closed down, and a new team-driven fan page opened in 2008: "ciaranhinds.eu"! Earlier in that year, Sylvie had already taken over the main administration of the Yahoo group, appointing Anja second leader. Back in 2008, another American lady, Liesl, worked for the site, but dropped out, sadly due to personal reasons. At the end of 2008, Bettina teamed up as well. So that built the foundation for a very successful decade, with one team member skilled to meet historical, technical, online and database management, one with multimedia, PR and strategic skills, and one with a lot of time to invest.

Until 2012, a first functional cooperation of website, social media channels and Yahoo group was built up, and ran successfully, thanks to the help of grateful fans and good team communication. The website itself was re-launched several times, since Mr. Hinds' projects offered quite an amount of content to handle. The Twitter account was opened to fans over 5 years ago.

From 2008 on, Ciarán's career brought him back on stage, so that the team was lucky enough to meet him in person on a yearly basis. In February 2008, Sylvie had already seen him on stage in New York in Conor McPherson's The Seafarer, and the whole team met him in London for the first time after Burnt by the Sun. In 2011, Bettina even could attend a screening of The Eclipse and bring back some snapshots, on a special occasion in Düsseldorf, where Ciarán presented the movie.

In 2015, we were very grateful to have Ciarán's support, organizing tickets when we wanted to see him in Hamlet, since the performances were sold out over a Benedict Cumberbatch hype. Over a decade, duties and tasks were reorganized for all participants. Sylvie had her hands full as head of the team, technical database management, Google, search requirements, and content manager. The daily calendar was filled by Anja, who handled all social media channels as well as PR/strategical requirements. Bettina used her time to search for older information, news that popped up, when Sylvie and Anja were occupied by their professional activities, and other front end tasks.

Year 2018 marked an anniversary: "10 years CiaranHinds.eu". Ciarán celebrated that special occasion with us, and kindly agreed to answer fan questions. The resulting Q&A was published on a daily basis during the celebration month. That same year, another re-launch of the website in April (a lot of codewriting for Sylvie) took place, in order to make it mobile and tablet friendly, and give it a more up-todate look.

Twitter posts boosted the date as well, and almost doubled subscribers. In October 2018, Bettina decided to drop her activities, and withdraw to her own projects. A change for managerial tasks took place to make the network fit for the future, and meet the demands of daily activities and special tasks, including Tumblr and Instagram, and a wider fit for news and links mentioning Ciarán for the daily calendar.

The PoD game will continue too. A handful of new contributors and fans moved up. Mr. Hinds' management in London has gotten us a new name in the agency to hand on news on movie and theatre projects as well.

We are grateful to have so many contributors for the network. We wish to thank them all for their past contributions. We are looking forward to your links, ideas or pictures; project news, clips or selfies - to make it the best international endeavor, under French law, run by a French-German-American-English team, celebrating an Irish actor.