Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Starting with 1821 and running up to the last census in the predigital
era in 1971, the Irish censuses, usually conducted on a decennial basis,
form one of the principal elements in the DIHS. The DIHS program was
initiated by the Department of Social and Economic History at QUB in
1990 to draw together the main sources of census and survey data in Irish
history and provide a repository for a wide range of other related mate-
rial, including annual emigration estimates and poverty assessments
derived from Poor Law Union statistics.
7
Funded by the Economic and
Social Research Council (ESRC) and by QUB itself, the initial phase of
the DIHS project was focused on bringing together these data from the
period up to 1911. Subsequent funding made possible the inclusion of
additional data for the later period since the partition of Ireland in 1921
up to 1971.
8
In the earlier phase, manual inputing of statistics from the
source papers was required, but thereafter the availability of high-quality
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) considerably hastened the process
of data capture.
9
Since 1971 decennial census data have been published
in digital format by both the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research
Agency (NISRA) and its counterpart in the Republic of Ireland, the Cen-
tral Statistics Office (CSO). The inclusion of these data in the DIHS made
it possible to construct a time series extending from the mid-nineteenth
century up to the most recent censuses for both Northern Ireland and
the Republic. Furthermore, after the “Troubled Geographies” project
commenced, it was discovered that data coverage could be extended
farther back in time by utilizing the survey on religious demography
available from the 1834 First Report of Commissioners of Public In-
struction, Ireland. The 1834 report differed from later censuses in that it
was a poll of church service atendance on a given Sunday in that year,
thus giving a measure of practice, rather than being a census of nominal
religious affiliation, as would later become the norm.
10
However, the re-
port has been judged to be a reliable indicator of the populations of the
major denominations at that time. Use of these 1834 data in conjunction
with data for later years facilitated an analysis of the impact of the Great
Famine on the different religious groupings, although that is not the
main focus here.
11
The “Troubled Geographies” project can be viewed as contribut-
ing to a trend being established by some leading scholars toward using
