Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
was the only district in the south to have a noticeably higher percentage
of non-Catholics in 1926 compared to the percentage in the district in
1911. Buncrana was one of the “Treaty Ports,” which were to be retained
for the use of Britain's Royal Navy under the Anglo-Irish accord of De-
cember 1921.
25
However, these are exceptional cases. More generally, the
decreased percentages in 1926 for many districts in the south indicate a
rapid reduction of the Protestant population from an already low base.
The message from the preceding figures is that the contours of Irish
religion were changing with the 1921 partition but that this trend contin-
ued into later decades as well. The polarization between Catholic-dom-
inated districts in the south and Protestant districts in the north was
becoming clearer and was a reflection of deeper political differences.
A final illustration of this is provided by the maps in figure 3.5, which
again were produced using a local indicator technique for identifying
spatial clustering.
26
A n sel i n's LISA method has a specific advantage over
the local Moran's
I,
as it can identify clusters of both low and high values
simultaneously. The local Moran's
I
technique used in figure 3.3 cannot
identify significant clusters where populations are universally high or
low across wider geographical areas. In figure 3.5 the results show more
clearly changes in prominent (statistically significant) clusters. These
clusters are labeled by type, “high-high” and “low-low” indicating sig-
nificant clusters of districts having similarly high or low percentages,
respectively. The two other types, “low-high” and “high-low,” conversely
indicate districts with percentages that are significantly different from
their neighbors. In 1911 the Catholic population was highest over vast
swathes of the south and west of the island, covering almost all of the
provinces of Connacht and Munster and signified by the “high-high”
designation covering many districts in those locations. Conversely, they
were lowest in the extreme northeast in the districts included in the
“low-low” cluster, which covers almost all of what was soon to become
Northern Ireland. By 2001-2002, however, there had been a change in
this patern. he signiicant cluster identiied at this date is smaller than
that shown on the 1911 map (excluding districts along the Atlantic sea-
board), pointing to a growth in the non-Catholic share of the popula-
tions of these areas. Indeed, a lone “low-high” district has emerged on
the shores of Galway Bay, indicating an area of lower Catholic population
