Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the island has been left
with a religious landscape that has proved both highly distinctive and
in certain regards remarkably persistent over time.
3
The close identifica-
tion of Catholicism with nationalist aspirations and the emergence of a
unionist ideology in response among the Protestant population in the
late nineteenth century have meant that there still exists an extremely
powerful coalescence between religious affiliation and political belief
unparalleled in the Western world.
4
The corollary of this is that political
disagreements surrounding identities, rights, and loyalties have usually
reflected broader religious or ethnic antagonisms and that conflicts ac-
cruing from these have had distinctive spatial characteristics.
5
A desire
to disentangle some of these interwoven strands and to provide a beter
understanding of change in Ireland's contested religious geographies
since the mid-nineteenth century therefore provided a compelling basis
for this work.
“Spatial analysis” encompasses a growing class of techniques for
studying phenomena using their geographical characteristics and distri-
butions. A major spatial analysis of change in Ireland's religious geogra-
phies was made possible in particular by the availability of census data
at detailed territorial levels. Unlike Britain, religion has continuously
formed part of the Irish census since the mid-nineteenth century. The
availability of census data on the subject from 1861 onward is testament
to the differing role of religion within the political cultures of Ireland and
Britain historically, with Irish enthusiasm for enumerating Catholic and
Protestant groups being based on a desire to establish the levels of sup-
port for the broader competing ideologies of nationalism and unionism.
6
The availability of detailed data from successive Irish censuses not only
on religion but on a range of other demographic and social variables as
well made it possible to propose a collaborative project between Lancas-
ter University and Queen's University Belfast (QUB). A key objective of
this collaboration was to integrate a Geographical Information System
(GIS) with the preexisting Database of Irish Historical Statistics (DIHS)
and to use the resultant data to analyze the relationships between reli-
gious identity, place, and other characteristics. A second objective, to
extend the analysis of these relations to another database of Troubles-re-
lated fatalities, is described later in the chapter.
