This mixed method study employed survey and interviews to explore in an Irish context, whether Indigenous perspectives on nature have persisted. It examined sixty-five participants’ experiences of connection and communication with nature places, their place-based cultural influences, and their environmental beliefs and behaviours. Employing a phenomenological perspective, findings revealed often strong connections, attachments and embodied communications with nature places, shaped by the folklore and cultural traditions. These environmentally attuned relationships offered a wide range of benefits and prompted reciprocal responses toward nature places, including practical and spiritual care and broader engagement in pro-environmental behaviours. Most participants connected with nature places through a lived relational worldview aligned with Celtic cosmology resonant with global Indigenous perspectives. This was characterised by beliefs in nature’s sentience, sacredness, and corresponding requirements for ethical responsibility. Nature communications were frequently associated with transpersonal experiences including personifications of nature as calming or mothering and often accompanied by feelings of awe and wonder. The findings indicate that despite Westernisation and the legacy of a colonial past, Indigenous lifeworlds and cosmologies grounded in attuned relationships with natural places, sustained and lived through religious/spiritual heritages, culture and folklore, persist and continue to inform contemporary ecological consciousness and behaviour in Ireland. Keywords Human-nature communications, Celtic and Indigenous ontologies, ecological beliefs and behaviours, Irish nature-based culture and folklore traditions, phenomenology
This paper presents a methodology for generating dasymetric maps to estimate the number of people per building using Geographic Information Systems (GIS), census data, building polygons and postal addresses, taking the Republic of Ireland as the study area. The literature review explores the data sources available, the most commonly used techniques when analysing population, with a special focus on dasymetric mapping, as well as previous studies on the population of the Republic. A detailed description of the data processing applied, the analysis tools, the parameters and the software used throughout the process is also presented. The results show a level of detail very close to that collected at household level during the census night and to an extent not previously seen in research within this domain.
The response of the Irish landscape to projected changes in climate is not well documented. Although general predictions of climate change for Ireland are well understood, aspects relevant to the impacts of climate change on specific hazards such as landslides have not been adequately discussed. This paper presents a position-based review of how climate change may influence landslide hazards in Ireland, drawing on existing datasets and published examples. Rather than present a new empirical dataset, the paper synthesises existing knowledge and proposes a research agenda for Ireland. We first summarise the past and current and the modelled climate change under future climate change scenarios. We focus in particular on climate parameters commonly associated with slope instability, including rainfall intensity and duration, prolonged dry and rewetting cycles, storm tracks, wind, and wave action To illustrate how projected climate changes may affect landslide activity in Ireland, we draw on data from the all-Ireland landslide inventory (Cullen and Bourke, 2024). While Cullen and Bourke (in review) present a national-scale analysis of this dataset, the current study adopts a case study approach to highlight specific examples that reveal both data limitations and research opportunities. The three case studies illustrate a range of antecedent and event meterological conditions. Our analysis of hourly rainfall preceding three landslides in 2020 shows that failures, particularly in peatlands, may occur under varying hydrometeorological conditions. In two cases, landslides followed intense rainfall after prolonged dry periods, while in another, failure occurred during an extended period of persistent wetness. This suggests that both short-duration rainfall extremes and antecedent moisture conditions play critical roles in landslide triggering, with the sequence of wet antecedent conditions followed by intense rainfall emerging as a particularly important pattern in the Irish context. Based on this and broader evidence, we suggest that landslide frequency in Ireland is likely to increase under future climate conditions characterised by more intense rainfall and greater variability in wet and dry spells. While most well documented events to date involve peat failures, we note a significant data gap regarding coastal slope failures, where climate-driven changes in sea level and storm dynamics may have compounding effects. Addressing these gaps is essential for improving future landslide risk assessment and mitigation strategies. We propose that future landslide research in Ireland prioritise several key areas. First, there is a need for detailed investigation into the role of rainfall intensity, duration, and temporal variability in triggering mass movements, particularly under changing climatic conditions. Second, long-term (multi-decadal) studies should be undertaken to capture the full range of slope responses to individual events and to sequences of storms, helping to distinguish between immediate triggers and cumulative preconditioning factors. Third, more frequent and systematic monitoring is needed, including annual topographic surveys and rapid post-event assessments, to document geomorphic change and improve hazard forecasting. Finally, dedicated research is required to understand the interaction between sea-level rise, storm surges, and wave impacts on coastal landslides, where both marine and terrestrial processes are important.
Ronnie Buchanan was Professor of Geography at Queen’s University of Belfast (QUB) and formerly Director of its Institute of Irish Studies between 1982 and 1993. He spent most of his academic career at QUB where he gained a PhD in 1958. Following a year teaching in the USA, he joined the Department of Geography QUB as a lecturer in 1959, becoming full professor in 1982. Three distinct sets of contributions can be identified in terms of his legacy. First, in pedagogical terms, he encouraged students to analyse their subject matter and adopt a more holistic approach to the study of geography. He was committed to interdisciplinary research. Second, he contributed in many ways to the work and education of future planners as reflected in his publications which went beyond his own specialism of Irish historical geography. He had the ability to go outside the ivory tower of academia to the real world of policy and practice. Third, he actively engaged with students to gain a better understanding of their backgrounds and motivations. Future generations of geographers and planners will be rewarded by recognising the contribution he made to our understanding of the changes impacting on our urban and rural spaces.
National landslide inventories are essential for effective landslide management and adaptation to climate change. The Island of Ireland has two separate inventories compiled by two different government agencies. We present the methodology for the construction of the first all-island landslide database (Cullen and Bourke, 2023). We use the two previously assembled jurisdictional databases supplemented with our own data. The new all-Ireland landslide inventory contains a total of 3098 landslides, including 134 previously unreported landslides. In addition, we supplemented the records with weather conditions for an additional 86 landslides. The all-Ireland landslide database contains the earliest written landslide record documented globally. There is the potential to extend and enhance the inventory through further exploitation of historical sources. We find that the number of failures listed in coastal locations are significantly under-reported. A preliminary analysis of the database indicates that most slope failures in Ireland occur in peat (45%) and 95% of those are associated with wet conditions. This is significant given the predicted changes in climate.
This article traces the development of military mapping in Ireland during the early and middle twentieth century. Particular attention is given to the evolution of precise systems for the identification of location, the use of maps for training and for military manoeuvres, the use of maps during the 1920-21 War of Independence, and the development of 1:20,000 scale maps for military requirements. Artillery training maps at this scale were produced for the British Army during World War 1, and the 1:20,000 scale was again explored by the Irish military during the late 1920s and in the 1930s. Features of these maps were the use of closely spaced contours, a grid system to specify locations, and partial or complete metrication of heights and distances. Proposals for a 1:20,000 scale map series made by the Irish authorities were followed by subsequent technical assessment. Several experimental and innovative map sheets were published, possibly partly as a result of military training exercises, during the 1930s. Their modern design and influence from British and French cartographic traditions has attracted attention. However, the impact of World War II curtailed the further development of the 1:20,000 series. The postwar focus was on modernising the triangulation framework, creating an appropriate Irish grid and then re-organising map scales to ‘rounded’ numbers suitable for the metric system and comparable to most other European countries. The survey organisations in both Dublin and Belfast participated in these developments, but it was in Northern Ireland that a new phase of military mapping was precipitated by the ‘Troubles’ that began in the late 1960s and which lasted some three decades. That mapping included a special 1:20,000 map series that was never formally published and, for the main urban centres, ‘religious areas’ maps together with specially adapted 1:2500 maps.
This paper explores the intersection of agricultural policy, land management, and wildfire risk in Ireland's upland regions, with a particular focus on the unintended consequences of Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). Specifically, I investigate the shift towards extensification under recent CAP reforms, which has led to a decline in livestock numbers and subsequent undergrazing in parts of the Irish uplands. While these changes may have contributed to improvements to lands overgrazed by sheep in parts of the country, they may have also facilitated the encroachment of scrub vegetation, which can disrupt native habitats and heighten wildfire risk. I examine how CAP's Basic Income Support for Sustainability (BISS) payments may incentivise field burning to maintain grazable land, thus exacerbating fire hazards in sensitive upland ecosystems. I further consider the role of rural depopulation and an ageing farming population in diminishing active land management, complicating fire risk mitigation efforts. This paper advocates for the development of integrated policies that balance agricultural productivity with ecological and fire risk considerations, proposing more adaptive policy frameworks that address both the socio-economic and ecological dynamics of upland farming.
Spatially referenced heading locations in football are being used to support sports analytics, but also used to make decisions to reduce long-term brain injuries in players. Here, we develop a proof-of-concept to identify heading locations in amateur football in Ireland, combing video analytics, geographic information systems and science (GIS), cartography, and sports-geography to support this pressing issue. This is to our knowledge the first time such research has been undertaken on Irish sport. Video recordings from six amateur premier teams were used to gather and digitise location information on headers. These headers were classified into a typology and visualised to support spatial cognition. In total, we identified 534 headers across five games, varying in location and typology. We found that defensive headers were the most common type, accounting for over half of all recorded headers. Goal kicks and throw-ins also contributed significantly to the total number of headers. This research highlights the important positional aspect of the wings in heading, which is a novel result, while the condition of the pitch affected the styles of play of the teams involved, with wet conditions and poorly maintained playing surfaces leading to more headers. The need to deconstruct spatially referenced heading locations by typology, league, and level will be important considerations for policy makers, coaches, and players.
Microplastics pose a growing environmental threat across beaches globally. A first step in management is the assessment of existing levels. In this study microplastic abundance, morphologies, colourations, diversity and relationships with potential influencing variables were assessed for six different beaches in Northern Ireland’s north coast. Beaches with a range of anthropogenic pressures were sampled in summer and winter. Significant differences were noted in microplastic abundances between urban and rural beaches (p=0.004), and between summer and winter (p=0.03). Fibres were the most abundant morphology (76.6%) and blue was the most common microplastic colouration (46.7%). Blue fibres were the most observed morphology/colouration combination (40.7%). Positive relationships between Fibres correlated positively with river presence and storm water outlets, while fragments correlated with urbanisation. Microplastics were ubiquitous across all beaches regardless of beach rurality or season. Pollution risk (higher MP abundances and diversity) increased in summer and on urban beaches. Summer tourism, rivers and storm water outlets were identified as likely sources.
Recent digitisation of major meteorological sources has offered valuable insights into Ireland's past climate. However, more localised historical weather data remain sparse for most of the country. A largely unexplored resource lies in the early nineteenth century Ordnance Survey (OS) statistical reports collected as a component of the first OS of Ireland. This research sets out how a team of researchers applied diverse techniques such as corpus linguistics, Geographic Information Systems, and sentiment analysis to explore the early OS weather records. Weather Journals from 15 parish “memoirs” across seven northern counties were extracted from the text, providing both qualitative observations and quantitative temperature and pressure data. The readings were analysed and visualised, and a sentiment analysis completed on the qualitative weather observations using a bespoke sentiment dictionary. This reveals inconsistencies in weather recording practices, even by the same individual across multiple parishes. These records offer unique applications, including local weather insights from the early nineteenth century, showcasing the possibilities of using a combination of data types in the study of historic weather. They also shed light on the experiences and methods of OS staff, contributing to a deeper understanding of Ireland's meteorological and survey history.
Several million maps of, or relating to, Ireland – the greatest volume ever produced in a short period – were prepared during the early 1940s as authorities in Ireland, Britain and Germany struggled to anticipate the cartographic needs that might ensue were Ireland to become a theatre of conflict in the European sector of an expanding world war. This article explores some of the key features of this short but distinctive episode in Irish cartographic history. An introductory section includes a short review of some of the more significant requirements of military maps, most notably the need for convenience of use and the availability of a grid system that allows locations to be pinpointed accurately. The principal map series produced by or for the military authorities in Ireland, Britain and Germany are then described, with the main attention being given to the small- and medium-scale topographic maps available for land forces. Map scales ranging from 1:10,000 for Belfast to 1:1,000,000 are involved, with particularly large quantities being printed of the 1:63,360 GSGS 4136 map series. A classification of the coastline and of offshore geology is a feature of some German map series. A final section gives a brief consideration to the fate of the various map series.
This study provides a detailed examination of Brazilian migration from Anápolis in Goiás (Brazil) to Gort in County Galway, Ireland, highlighting the complexity and diversity of motivations behind this movement. Unlike previous research, which primarily focused on middle-class Brazilians moving to Dublin for education, this study broadens the scope to include labour migration to a rural location, incorporating a more varied demographic and a more comprehensive range of determinants. The findings reveal that economic determinants related to (1) unemployment, costs of living (Brazil), and employment opportunities (Ireland), (2) the wish to acquire or buy material goods and funds to open a business, (3) education, and (4) indebtedness play a significant role but are not thesole drivers. The findings also indicate the importance of non-economic sociocultural determinants related to (1) family, relationships, and sexuality, (2) lifestyle dynamics and feelings of nostalgia and longing for Ireland, (3) unsafe urban conditions and a flawed political system in Brazil, (4) religion and religious missions, and (5) health and wellbeing. The study challenges the common perception that economic factors are the primary motivations for migration. The diverse range of sociocultural factors plays an equally important role. The findings dispute that Brazilian migration to Gort is homogenous and solely labour-related. Migrants have a variety of personal and social reasons influencing their decisions.
Through its Global Ireland strategy, the Government of Ireland is projecting an ambitious foreign policy platform into the global commons. A range of policy modules have been developed and are being deployed discursively in specific targeted markets. It is an ambitious programme, for a small country. Common narratives of Ireland and Irish identity are being projected fuzzily, to best effect, in different regions. Commonly held policy narratives include i) Ireland as a networked member of the international economic order, ii) Ireland as a European Union member of long standing, iii) Ireland as an edge-island, iv) Ireland as an emigrant sending state with a widely distributed diaspora. Here, I find that Ireland successfully deploys these sometimes contradictory narratives from a deliberately interstitial foundation in space. The nexus of connection and separation is creatively deployed in these Irish policies and the Government of Ireland is seen to be performing a powerful political geography as a result.
Water is one of the most important ecosystems for human survival. However, although vastly improved, bathing water quality in Ireland is still jeopardised by a range of factors, including poor sewage management. Concerns have been raised over the increasing range of pollutants that may adversely impact swimmers. This is particularly problematic, given the rising number of people engaging in wild swimming since the pandemic. Not only have numbers increased, but so has the swimming season, far beyond the traditional summer period. Swimming provides numerous health benefits; however, bathing water monitoring and certain forms of water treatment are still often confined to the summer period. This may leave members of the public, who are largely unaware of such limitations, at considerable risk. Improved public awareness of the pollution risks of wild swimming is required. Increased water quality monitoring is also suggested, alongside improved year-round waste-water treatment. Improvements in the use of sensors, as well as engagement with citizen science and satellite monitoring may help improve the monitoring of bathing water quality into the future.
This study examines the transformation of the rural townland of Greater Cabragh into the Dublin suburb of Navan Road between 1935 and 1960. This evolution was an instance of the twentieth century suburbanisation of Dublin, as the previously centralised city burst its boundaries and spread into its hinterland. This change had its origins in early 20th century, when a substantial portion of Dublin’s population lived in overcrowded, insanitary tenements in city’s centre. A series of reports proposed that a healthier future lay in re-locating much of the populace to the city’s fringe. The subsequent suburban colonisation of areas to the north and west of the city would see the percentage of County Dublin’s population living outside the canals grow from 47% in the 1936 to 75% in the 1961. With the map of Dublin being remade, the transformation of Greater Cabragh was an instance of the impact of macro suburbanisation processes on a landscape, a legacy community and an incoming community. The initial land holdings in the townland are charted, revealing a district dominated by farmland belonging to religious institutions and a small number of private land holders. Using land valuation records, the paper maps the decade by decade transition as land passed to private developers and co-operatives, who constructed owner-occupier homes for the lower middle classes.
River water quality in Ireland is in decline. The Maigue River in County Limerick exemplifies this decline with degrading chemical and ecological water quality. The most significant pressures are agriculture, and to a lesser extent, hydromorphology, urban and domestic wastewater systems. Because human activity is a main source of pressure on riverine systems and natural habitats, part of the solution rests in increasing local community interest, involvement, and cooperation in water and catchment management initiatives. This study profiles efforts made to foster engagement with residents of the Maigue River catchment. A devastating pollution event precipitated the formation of a community water group that provided initiatives to increase public involvement in events and projects focusing on river water quality and biodiversity. Most of the initiatives would not have been possible without the individual attributes of local participants, an organisational structure (Maigue Rivers Trust), and champion (Project Officer), and supporting funds, training, and resources. These bottom-up efforts demonstrate that voluntary engagement supported by core funding helped further the public participation aims of conservation legislation (Water Framework Directive and River Basin Management Plans) and expanded catchment stewardship. However, future sustainability, with meaningful improvements in water quality, requires time, a functioning structure, and adequate resources, as part of a coherent integrated catchment management approach, if trusting relationships with local communities are to be developed and maintained.
Drawing from an increased interest in blue space as a setting for health and wellbeing, a range of new theoretical ideas have emerged from within that space. Across different settings and practices, marine and inland, there is a strong immersive element that connects with wider theoretical work on therapeutic landscapes and assemblages of health. This paper will utilise a particular blue space practice, swimming, to develop a theoretical approach that foregrounds embodied, emotional and experiential dimensions of what can be termed therapeutic accretion. Swimming across the lifecourse is built on multiple ‘blue moments’, both positive and negative. These emerge from a series of intimate immersions and exposures, which represent an affective place capture around water that help promote wellbeing in its broadest sense. While swimming can be and is a risky practice, this is countered by its acknowledged benefits for physical, and increasingly, mental health and wellbeing. Therapeutic accretion specifically identifies positive exposures to places, spaces and communities that build assemblages of health and resilience across time and space. Based on empirical research within Ireland and wider recent writing on swimming, the terms immersion and exposure are used to illustrate how therapeutic accretion develops and concretises over time, yet also ebbs and flows across the lifecourse. Identifying swimming as a process of therapeutic accretion within blue space adds to wider nature-based practices research that documents how such practices, individual and communal, act as empowering bonds between people and place.
This article argues that the political campaigning on Twitter of two far-right parties during the 2020 Irish General Election worked to disseminate far-right populist tendencies through their discursive use of conservative geopolitical imaginaries of Ireland. The material harvested for this study consists of 631 original tweets posted by the official Twitter accounts of The National Party and the Irish Freedom Party during the period of January 14 – February 8 2020. Using thematic analysis, this article argues that much of the Twitter content of these two parties centred around three central themes: anti-establishment, anti-immigration, and evoking Irish history. Uniquely, permeating all four themes of the political parties’ accounts are discourses of “patriotism” which configure much of their social media rhetoric as part of an “Ireland for the Irish” geopolitical imaginary. From this analysis, we argue that the National Party and Irish Freedom Party not only disseminated their nationally-specific far-right agendas in their tweets during the 2020 General Election, but that they did so through using geopolitical imaginaries and rhetoric that are reminiscent of far-right populist movements more broadly across Europe and the US in order to rationalise their movement and legitimise their conservative geopolitical imaginaries of Ireland.
The changing long-term and short-term influence of Dublin is reviewed in relation to journey time information which can be extracted from timetables for early nineteenth-century mail coaches and for later train and bus services. Travel times from Dublin to some sixteen places across Ireland are examined to demonstrate the expanding and intensifying influence of the Dublin city-region. In 2024 journey speeds to these sixteen places were on average between six and seven times faster than in the mail coach era. At least in relation to public transport, a degree of time-space convergence is evident in some of the fastest travel speeds being to the larger places within the state. However, the emergence of a radial motorway system has meant that, with the exception of travel to parts of the north-west, contrasts in journey speeds are relatively muted.
This paper approaches aspects of population change in small villages of rural Ireland. Along these pages, this paper contributes to improve the geographic knowledge about the perception of social, economic, and environmental dimensions of rural sustainability. This paper is mainly based on statistical, documental, and cartographical work as well as data collected during fieldwork, focusing on small villages of Cavan and Leitrim, where semi-structured interviews with various informants were conducted. Thus, this paper contributes to give voice both to rural immigrants and to locally born inhabitants. Among results of the qualitative analysis, some challenges for sustainability can be interpreted as (relatively) less entangled than others. For instance, prejudice or xenophobia are more clearly linked to the social dimension of sustainability (but can have an impact on the ability to attract foreign workers), while access to credit and support for rural business development are more clearly linked to the economic dimension (but have a social impact due to the scarcity/lack of jobs available or the low quality jobs on offer), and environmental education, recycling and waste management are more clearly linked to the environmental dimension (but there will be new job opportunities if more waste management policies are implemented).
