Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Service History operating within the UK Data Archive at the University
of Essex.
14
The approach taken with the GIS may be regarded as a repeated
cross-sectional approach; that is, it is based on analyzing successive sets
of data for different points in time and comparing the results. Support
for more integrated space-time representation and analyses remains a
research topic for HGIS and GIS more generally.
15
However, the afore-
mentioned changes to territorial boundaries complicated even this
cross-sectional approach. In most national contexts, boundary changes
for statistical and administrative units are at some point inevitable if
those units are to continue to reflect changes in population size and
distribution. Ireland is of course no exception to those trends, but while
it did see rapid population growth up until the 1840s, from that point
onward its demographic experience differed markedly from every other
developed nation, being the only one with a population to
decrease
com-
pared to the level in the mid-nineteenth century.
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This may mean that
the boundary adjustments occurring over Ireland, although substantial
in their own right, are, comparatively speaking, less in total than the
corresponding level of changes experienced in other modern states.
Nonetheless, these boundary alterations posed challenges in terms of
the ability to determine key changes in the island's demography and
religious geographies over time. The extreme version of this is when
an entire set of administrative divisions becomes redundant and is re-
placed by another. Both of these scenarios have been recurrent themes
in the construction of analyses possible using the Irish HGIS.
Figure 3.1 presents the core geographies for which data in the Irish
HGIS are available. The earliest material from the 1834 First Report men-
tioned earlier is on atendance at religious services on the chosen census
day and was published at the very aggregate level of the contemporary
Church of Ireland diocese (there were thirty-two dioceses at this time).
The next available data came from the first inclusion of a religion inquiry
in the decennial census in 1861. These data were available at the bar-
ony level (there were 334 baronies across Ireland in that year). A major
change occurred after 1901, with the medieval baronies replaced by the
urban and rural district (URD) structure, the later lasting through to the
second half of the twentieth century, with 220 districts in the then Re-
