Troubled Geographies:
Two centuries of Religious Division in Ireland

Religion has played a defining role in shaping Irish culture, society, identity and attitudes.  Geography is essential to understanding religion in Ireland. As a marker of national identity it was used, for example, to delimit Northern Ireland when the island was partitioned. It has also underpinned many aspects of the recent ‘Troubles’ where the spatiality of conflict has been shaped by ‘sense of place’ and the geography of community background. Likewise, changing denominational distributions and numbers have been the subject of debate in the Republic of Ireland. It is therefore remarkable that despite the importance of religion, religious geographies over longer historical periods have been neglected.  This project addresses this lacuna providing information on the geography of religion on the island of Ireland through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  Researching religion and society requires a fusion of approaches from the humanities and the social sciences. Narratives about religion and society are combined, for example, with insights gained from quantitative spatial analysis using historical Geographical Information Systems (GIS). The objectives of the project are to explore the interactions between religion, demography, violence and identity in Ireland, to provide a data resource for scholarly use, and to develop an online interactive atlas for the wide public.

Aims:

1. To extract data from nineteenth and twentieth century censuses and to use GIS approaches to cope with changing administrative boundaries, allowing us to construct time-series of the geography of religion using consistent spatial units.
2. To use the GIS to link religious denomination to a range of social, economic, and demographic indicators to explore the relationship between religion and these variables in different parts of Ireland through time.  
3. To conduct a detailed analysis 1971-2001 of the relationship between the geography of community background, as measured by religion, and acts of violence in Northern Ireland.
4. To create an interactive online atlas that maps changing geographies of religious denomination and the relationship between these geographies and other economic, social and demographic indicators.