I've got a feeling when the rest of the VCs were digitized by NBN et al, the funding was only available for Britain.

Since writing that I've read Rich Burkmar's account at http://www.tombio.uk/?q=dordogne-blog where he mentions the problems of locating good boundaries for France.
He came up with http://professionnels.ign.fr/geofla#tab-3 and I was referring to IGN's 2002 http://georezo.net/jparis/Data/ plus http://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/ … ce-grids-1 above.

Those OpenStreetMap & GitHub links oddly don't seem to operate properly. Copy the link and paste it into your search panel and they are found OK.

Exactly which file were you trying to load.

I can't load it either into R6 or ArcGis. Message in ArcGis is can't open feature class. I am not sure what this means or what can be done to fix it.

Because it's free I'm using QGIS.
I'm just guessing but I think I figured out why the GitHub links act like Will-o-the-Whisps, OpenStreetMap stuff is continually being revised so new batches of data are similarly being uploaded (with different names, the date is usually part of the filename). The correct link will always be in the project, they save the data somewhere differently on GitHub every time they update (correct me if I'm wrong).
Some success with the Irish grid. Rich Burkmar told me that his OSGR tooll (part of the plugin set for QGIS entitled Tom.Bio tools which you can find detailed on FSC's Tomorrow's Biodiversity website and which is easy to install within QGIS) will create grid squares wherever you wish. Indeed that proved to be the case. In QGIS simply load up one or both of your layers for Ireland and set the Coordinate Reference System to OSNI 1952 / Irish National Grid EPSG:29901. Invoke Rich's OSGR tool and use it to create 100km square tiles which can then be saved as a .shp file. Repeat for 10km tiles.
Unfortunately these tiles aren't labelled - not a problem with the 100km tiles which can be done manually but a bit of a laborious task with the 10km tiles (if anyone can be bothered doing this I'd be glad of a copy).
Distribution maps can now be created using either of QGIS' Point in polygon or Join attributes by location methods using CSV outputs (from Recorder 6) which have Lat & Long fields.  Rich tells me that he's had enquiries about extending his TomBio toolset to Ireland - maybe one day.
I've no data to play with for Ireland, the millipede dataset from Colin Fairhurst I was playing with in the 1980s has long disappeared into media which can't be read any more. I would be grateful if anyone would be kind enough to let me have a CSV file of mixed taxa with Lat Long showing varied distribution across Ireland, any taxa will do  (https://www.researchgate.net/project/Eu … ogeography)