I dunno where they come from, but fadas and umlauts and tildes sure give us fits. They get lost or change into gobbledy-gook when they're included in the Digital Tradition. For a long time, Dick Greenhaus resisted the inclusion of songs with unusual characters in the DT, but he added sevaral this year, and they're mostly a mess. The DT appears in many different formats, and the conversion to various formats makes the fadas go bonkers.
They're also death on search engines, so I delete them from thread titles if I find them. If you use them in message titles, you do it at your own risk. It's hard to send personal messages to people like Brían and Áine.
-Joe Offer