Religious change in twentieth-century Ireland: a spatial history

Abstract

The conflicts that have deeply affected the island of Ireland in the twentieth century have been political, rather than religious, in basis. However, the powerful coalescence of Catholicism and nationalism on one hand, and Protestantism and unionism on the other, has meant that religious affiliation in Ireland has come to embody a wider range of cultural, political and social values. Furthermore, the successive waves of organised colonisation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have left the island with the legacy of a distinctive religious geography, which became the explicit template for the political division of the island in 1921 as well as having profound implications for its development since the European Reformation of the early modern period. Yet, despite its centrality to Irish history and geography, it has been difficult to assess detailed change in that religious geography due to the inconsistency of territorial units over time. This article presents findings from a major research project funded by the UK's Arts and Humanities Research Council which used Geographical Information Systems technology to standardise administrative boundaries across the island in the twentieth century. In doing so, it is able to shed new light on the radically divergent religio-spatial trajectories of different parts of the island in relation to political, social and economic developments.

Keywords:

• GIS
• population change
• religious geography
• census data
• areal interpolation
• segregation
• Ireland

Acknowledgements

The research that produced this paper was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council/Economic and Social Research Council's Religion and Society Programme under grant AH/F008929/1 ‘Troubled Geographies: Two centuries of religious division in Ireland’. Access to the grid square data for Northern Ireland were provided by the Census Office of the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency. We are grateful to Drs. C. Lloyd (Liverpool University) and I. Shuttleworth (Queen's University, Belfast) for their help with these data. Some additional data were derived from: CAIN Web Service Background Information on Northern Ireland Society – Religion http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/ni/religion.htm [Viewed 12th Feb 2013].