Roy Keane has made it but Niall Quinn hasn't. The Pogues are in but Westlife are out. GUBU has an entry but not so Ansbacher.
As it was officially launched in Dublin last night, The Encyclopaedia of Ireland - described as the "most ambitious and comprehensive work of reference published in Ireland in our lifetime" - was being scrutinised as much to see who was excluded as not.
"We had to do a huge amount of trimming," said general editor Brian Lalor, who admits to have been "sleeping and breathing" the project for the past five years. "Inevitably, you have to make selections. With a work like this, you invite brickbats and criticism, which no doubt we will get."
Apart from the number of entries, Lalor had to cut the length of contributions, sourced from 950 different specialists, including the odd "egomaniacal one" who filed a small book when a paragraph was requested.
"The desire was to strike a balance on many different levels. You have all the expected categories like famine, republicanism, Yeats and Joyce. But you also have so much more." Factual entries include those on the Angelus, which was inaugurated on Radio Éireann at 6 p.m. on August 15th, 1950, at the request of Archbishop John Charles McQuaid.
More discursive entries include one on "letters", opening with the statement: "While the character and significance of the epistolary in the annals of Irish culture and Irish life generally have still to receive comprehensive attention, not only editorially but generically and contextually, the letter's distinctive and valuable contribution to these annals may be readily perceived."
Mr Fergal Tobin, publishing director with Gill & Macmillan, said the project was the biggest "by a distance" with which he had been involved.
Even the publicity blurb was packed with facts and figures: more than 5,000 headwords, 1,256 pages and 700 illustrations. The book, which weighs a hefty four kilograms, was officially launched by Seamus Heaney who himself got an entry for achieving "the rare feat of being both critically respected and genuinely popular".
Mr Tobin noted that the "practical cut off point" for the first edition was the start of 2003. "I think the last thing we got in was the Spire on O'Connell Street."
The Encyclopaedia of Ireland published by Gill & Macmillan is priced €65.