Troubled Geographies:
Two centuries of Religious Division in Ireland

This site was developed as part of a project called Troubled Geographies: Two centuries of Religious Division in Ireland, funded by the AHRC and ESRC as part of their Religion and Society Programme. The project uses census data and Geographical Information Systems (GIS) to explore how Ireland's religions and societies have changed over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This period includes major shocks such as the Famine of the late 1840s, Partition and Civil War sin the early 1920s, and the Troubles in Northern Ireland which lasted from the late 1960s until the early 2000s. In addition, Irish society has faced the more conventional long-term changes common to many western countries over this period such as industrialisation and urbanisation, and later de-industrialisation and sub-urbanisation.

The project explores these changes with a strongly geographical slant.We make extensive use of maps, Historical GIS approaches, and spatial analysis techniques to explore these issues. Much of this website is concerned with disseminating our major findings using these techniques. Our aim is to accompany the site with an more in-depth account to be published in book form by Indiana University Press as part of their Spatial Humanities series. Here we present summaries of the religion and society on the island of Ireland primarily in map form. Some of this mapping is static based on conventional image file formats. For more advanced mapping we also make use of Social Explorer, an award winning inter-active mapping format that allows readers/users to explore the maps in greater depth. The links on the left-hand side of this page take you to these sections.