Irish Demographic Maps

[palandio]

The recorded murders numbers are absolute numbers, though. The "bigger" a division the more murders you can expect everything else being equal. So it would be interesting to see relative numbers. But in relation to what? Population? Not bad, but think of areas that are highly frequented but with low resident population. So it's difficult to come up with a perfect solution...

[Tetro Kornbluth]

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Oh no doubt

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I can't speak for Waterford or some of those parts in Dublin but I've lived in Cork - and in a fairly down at heel area at that and saw nothing.

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Yes but also numbers, percentages, etc.

Also Great map Jas

[EPG]

I would say that Waterford, with its post-industrial problems and its OSF/SFWP/Workers Party heritage, is comfortably more working-class than Limerick, which de facto includes big better-off areas in Castletroy and Dooradoyle, even if they'd never admit it.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I quite like Waterford. Which... may say more about me than...

[ObserverIE]

I would say that Waterford, with its post-industrial problems and its OSF/SFWP/Workers Party heritage, is comfortably more working-class than Limerick, which de facto includes big better-off areas in Castletroy and Dooradoyle, even if they'd never admit it.

Castletroy and Dooradoyle aren't/weren't within the official city limits.

[EPG]

Well, we're now getting into dubious analytical territory - the city/county boundary is where it is because the newer, well-off parts of the city don't want to pay commercial rates and share services with the older, poor parts. That's why they are being folded into a single county this year. So if we use that rule, not only do we skew towards a wrong-headed view of Limerick, but we assume Limerick city will cease to exist at the next local election.

[Tetro Kornbluth]

I would say that Waterford, with its post-industrial problems and its OSF/SFWP/Workers Party heritage, is comfortably more working-class than Limerick, which de facto includes big better-off areas in Castletroy and Dooradoyle, even if they'd never admit it.

Well yes, but I wasn't really thinking of Waterford as a city - technicalities notwithstanding. Limerick has also had more social problems coming from its deindustralisation - Waterford has had those o/c but never to the same extent.

Of course, the area surrounding Limerick is quite prosperous (and home to the PDs let it never be forgotten).

[Tetro Kornbluth]

Bump

Had a discussion about this in the IRC and decided make a map as I wasn't sure of some of the data. Even more hilarious than I expected (Look at Donegal!) although some of the patterns are not that surprising. Now if only we could test people...



Anyway, the key thing to note about this map is this a) the age brackets and b) the fact that more people claim to speak Irish in Dublin South than in North East Donegal, which indicates all you need to know about how people understood by the word 'speak'

(Also memo to self: use smaller font for bands in future)

[ilikeverin]

Would that were true!

[Cassius]

I assume a lot of yes responses came from people who have a basic understanding of the language, but nontheless aren't at all fluent? (sort of like me and Welsh, being able to say a few basic phrases, like dydw I ddim yn hoffi celf achos mae'n ddiflas does not equal proficiency in the language).

[Tetro Kornbluth]

I assume a lot of yes responses came from people who have a basic understanding of the language, but nontheless aren't at all fluent? (sort of like me and Welsh, being able to say a few basic phrases, like dydw I ddim yn hoffi celf achos mae'n ddiflas does not equal proficiency in the language).

Partly, also tokenism and aspiration.

Look at map of Dublin in that map and compare it to the other maps of Dublin I've posted.

[Tetro Kornbluth]

Okay, a more realistic map now but not without problems. There's basically no good way to figure out good figures for Irish speakers from the census, although this comes the closest.

Those who answer Yes to the question above are asked to fill in another question about the frequency of their ask, there are a couple of answers:

Speaks Irish daily only within the education system
Speaks Irish daily within and outside the education system
Speaks Irish daily outside the education system
Speaks Irish weekly outside the education system
Speaks Irish less often outside the education system
Speaks Irish never outside the education system
Speaks Irish outside the education system, otherwise not-stated

Needless to say with those questions and options there's... a lot of potential ambiguity. For this map below I combined the figures for the second and third options on the list and expressed them as a percentage of the total population. This is far from ideal (plenty of Irish speakers work as bureaucrats and in other jobs in Dublin, but how much is that represented here?) but it does seem to correspond much better to actual usage and knowledge patterns on the ground. Oh, except for pretentious exurbanites obviously.

 

[joevsimp]

Any reason why it's higher in Co. Kildare?

[Tetro Kornbluth]

Any reason why it's higher in Co. Kildare?

Not too sure but I suspect part of the reason is

Oh, except for pretentious exurbanites obviously.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Yeah, that's even more ridiculous than maps of Welsh speaking ability which is saying something.

[politicus]

Yeah, that's even more ridiculous than maps of Welsh speaking ability which is saying something.

Exaggerating numbers?

[EPG]

Worth an update. What happened since 2006?



We now have a quasi-official, quasi-published breakdown of religions by electoral division, to help resolve some old debates. Here they are presented by the "new" constituencies (not actually legislated for yet, in a minority government, so...). Note constituencies are drawn to give equal ratios of enumerated population to district magnitude, meaning they include non-Irish citizens and non-residents visiting on Census night.

Catholics and non-religious are the big two. Note every constituency is majority Catholic, and that will be even more true among eligible voters. Non-religious are relatively stronger in cities and their immediate peripheries. Not only are lay Catholic traditions almost forgotten among the Irish-born in areas like inner-city Dublin and Limerick that were profound in faith and public in adherence as late at the 1960s, but incomers also tend to move there, and comprise one-third of the total without religion.

The Church of Ireland and Presbyterian maps reflect historic settlement patterns in the last 500 years, with a fringe elements of more recent migration (like the English in West Cork). Presbyterians are very small minorities outside the two Ulster constituencies, and are now outnumbered by CoI in every constituency. The political impact of all this is very small. Only in Cavan-Monaghan is there even an arguable case that a Protestant bloc vote exists, I think.

The other groups also don't have political impact because their adherents tend to be non-Irish, non-UK citizens. Orthodox Christians and the "other religion" adherents tend to be recent arrivals to the island, living in new lower-middle income suburban and urban areas. They tend to favour the same areas, albeit Limerick City has attracted Muslim immigrants for over forty years. About half the Orthodox Christians are of Romanian or Moldovan extraction.

[Tetro Kornbluth]

There's absolutely a Protestant voting bloc in Cavan-Monaghan, as anyone who has looked at Heather Humphries and her various FG predecessors voting base has come from. Elsewhere it's more complicated but studies tend to suggest that the Protestant vote can be a decent vote bank for those who try to win its votes, unless they are SF of course (and FF would be unusual here).

Anecdotal evidence to me suggests in the constituency I'm registered to vote, Church of Ireland parishioners are a good voting bloc for Shane Ross. Of course, that's *parishioners* (average age I'm guessing is about retirement age if not older).

[EPG]

The real basics. Growth since 1991 is the most straightforward figure. Lots of growth in places within an hour's commute from Dublin's orbital motorway. Some growth 30 minutes from the equivalent employment zones of Cork in the south and in Galway in the west. Areas far from Dublin, Cork, Limerick, Galway and Derry have grown more slowly, but the same is true in some urban areas affected by demographic turnover. The only constituency to lose population since 1991 is Dublin Bay North, which happens to have the largest share of 1960-80 housing, and the smallest share of post-1980 housing.

As you may imagine, newly-settled areas have had more volatile political inclinations. Dublin Mid-West in 2002 being my favourite, electing FF, PDs and Greens in a 3-seater, but no FG or Labour, nor was this even a surprising result.

Rural areas include any contiguous built-up area with less than 1,500 people. The deeply rural areas tend to elect FF, FG and related independents. Near the border, SF may also get a opportunity, but they're much weaker in southerly rural areas. FF/FG/Inds mostly do worse in the urban constituencies, but the pattern is not so simple - FF could have taken 4 of 8 Cork City seats with enough candidates. Unambiguously stronger in urban areas are the small left-of-Labour parties and independents, as well as SF, including PBP, I4C, Socialist, Social Democrat, Green, etc etc etc and this has been true long before 2016. By the way, voters are even more rural than the population as a whole.

Population density is totally misleading at constituency level, so here's the detail. 1% of people live in 20% of the land area, mainly hills and bogs, and as physical limits these apply even near cities, like in the Dublin and Wicklow "Mountains". Especially in the west, these are classic "remote" areas, and like all remote areas, they tend to have a lot of dealings with incomers, leading to sometimes surprising political tendencies. Next category up, about 8% of people in 30% of the land area, usually agricultural areas without commuters to big towns. If you do not have a car and an anti-abortion voting pledge, do not expect to win votes here. Everybody else is distributed more or less in historic cities and towns, recent commuter belts, or along important roads. 100 years ago, this map looked much more like agricultural labour intensity and land/capital poverty, with big numbers in the western "congested districts".

[sinngael]

Outside of the Pale Ireland is really just a glorified farm