Troubled Geographies: A Spatial History of Religion and Society in Ireland (The Spatial Humanities)
Ian N. Gregory
Language: English
Pages: 264
ISBN: B00GCD0Z1S
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Ireland’s landscape is marked by fault lines of religious, ethnic, and political identity that have shaped its troubled history. Troubled Geographies maps this history by detailing the patterns of change in Ireland from 16th century attempts to "plant" areas of Ireland with loyal English Protestants to defend against threats posed by indigenous Catholics, through the violence of the latter part of the 20th century and the rise of the "Celtic Tiger." The book is concerned with how a geography laid down in the 16th and 17th centuries led to an amalgam based on religious belief, ethnic/national identity, and political conviction that continues to shape the geographies of modern Ireland. Troubled Geographies shows how changes in religious affiliation, identity, and territoriality have impacted Irish society during this period. It explores the response of society in general and religion in particular to major cultural shocks such as the Famine and to long term processes such as urbanization.
!! ! !! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !! ! ! ! ! 0 5 10 20 30 40 Miles ! ! ! that the settler populations in Ulster did not necessarily stay in the same places to which they were initially assigned. While the principal motivation may have been pecuniary in order to take advantage of the most profitable land, another impetus was related to security. Writing of the Ulster context, Philip Robinson suggests that settlers may have wished to congregate in the valleys, as these formed the points
counties had stabilized by 1901, south of what was to become the border the population continued to decline for decades. Table 5.1 elucidates these findings a little further. The initial fall between 1841 and 1851, by which point the full immediate effects of the Famine could not even yet be properly enumerated, was much more severe in the south than in the north, with the Republic of Ireland area dropping by 21.7 percent compared to just 12.5 percent for the Northern Ireland area. The
particularly interesting, however, is the lack of significant change in the north. This tells us two things. First, while Protestants clearly left the Free State in large numbers, Catholics did not leave Northern Ireland to any discernible extent. Second, while the non-Catholic population of the south fell by 115,000, the non-Catholic population of the north only rose by 23,000, suggesting that rather than there being a major migration from south to north, large numbers of Protestants left
party more by personal loyalty and patronage than by deeper ideological beliefs.23 It was perhaps an exaggerated characterization, traditionally associated more with rural areas than with the towns and cities, but the prevalence of the model should not be underestimated. There is a long and, in some senses, democratic tradition of direct special pleading between the voter and politicians operating at the highest levels of government, and this has meant that rural areas have historically had a
Thus in the Republic census questions on religion became less detailed, while in the north they became increasingly complex and separated religiously defined community identity from religious affiliation. This says much about the different ways in which religion was changing in the two parts of the island and the political context in which this was occurring. The changing geography of religion is shown in figure 9.9, which maps the numbers of Catholics in 1971, 1991, and 2001. It shows a