yes its true here the first paragraph that greets anyone trying to access the site reads as follows :

On the 24 July 2009, an Order was made by the High Court requiring eircom to block or otherwise disable access by its subscribers to the website thePirateBay.org, its related domain names, IP addresses and URLs. The Court was satisfied that on the basis of the evidence presented by the record companies that the PirateBay website is a website that facilitates the exchange of copyrighted sound recordings without the consent of the copyright owners.

but at the end they say , which is nice

eircom would like to reassure customers that: eircom will notmonitor customer?s activities at any stage, nor will it place any monitoring equipment or software on its network in order to facilitate this block.eircom will notprovide personal details or any information relating to customers to any third party, including the record companies.

It's a conflict reading about Net Neutrality and blocking a site that advocates piracy. But as someone who helps clean the malware that users pick up at sites like that, I'd like to see them all banned!

Proxy server anyone??

The pirate bay ALSO hosts a lot of legal files and software.

Actually, The Pirate Bay doesn’t host any illegal, or legal for that matter, material. It only provides the means for getting it from elsewhere, where it is hosted. Furthermore, it’s certainly true, as meant above, that much of such material is fully legit.

But let’s concentrate on piracy, which is the objectionable commodity. While not advocating it, strictly from the logistic point of view, I suppose the next step is to block Google, because it can certainly also be used for obtaining all sorts of warez, pirated software, music and movies, hacking tools, as well as other illegal material. You just need a little knowledge about how to search for it efficiently. Incidentally, Google can also lead to catching malware or getting phished.

Anticipating the counter-argument that Google is just an indexing service while The Pirate Bay provides access to the torrents, I retort that this is only a minor procedural difference that does not affect the end result of getting the illegal material directly by using it.

To my mind, it is of no consequence whether one gets the material by finding torrents or download links. They are equally effective for the purpose. But then I am not a lawyer.