Representing cultural divides in Ireland: Some nineteenth- and early twentieth-century mappings of variation in religion and language

Abstract

While the availability of suitable census statistics may be a necessary precondition, it may not be in itself sufficient for the production of particular types of thematic map. For over half a century, the collection and publication of Irish census statistics on the Irish language (from 1851) and religion (in 1834, and regularly from 1861) stimulated a rather limited cartographic response. This paper focuses on the Irish maps of Reverend Abraham Hume (1814_84), inter alia Church of England clergyman, antiquarian, ethnographer and maker of maps of the social condition of Liverpool. Thomas Larcom may have inspired manuscript maps showing the distribution of religions during the 1840s, but Hume has the distinction of putting into print what may be the first maps to record some of those divisions of religion and language that remain significant for regional identity in Ireland. He pre-dates by two decades a small band of outsiders - among them the statistician E.G. Ravenstein, the geographer E´ lise´e Re´clus and various atlas makers _ who were interested in making small-scale maps of Ireland related to these topics. However, the production of more detailed, larger-scale maps of language and religion gained very little momentum until the period when issues of power and identity had their most immediate expression: the 1910s and the 1920s.