Drawing lines on pages: remaking a very public geography

A short article I have written for the GSI’s GeoNews:

Building on work done by Prof. William Smyth and Michael Murphy and later publications by Prof. Paddy Duffy, the Catholic parish boundaries are finally digitised. It has taken four years, a summer internship and five different organisations to get to this stage but 1,360 parishes are about to be digitised for the first time. More than the exercise of vectorising rasters, the digitisation process is the creation of a very public geography.

Ask someone in Ireland where they are from and they’ll able to tell you which town or county they’re from. Ask them where in that county and chances are they’ll name a townland or a parish. But where is that parish? Maybe it is the GAA’s parish or perhaps it is the Catholic parish. In short, parish is often used as a loosely defined marker of place. This place is made and remade across time of course. The significance is that this parish has changed over time. My sense is though that parishes are less well known in city areas of Ireland than in less urbanised settings. For example, Na Fianna, my local GAA club does not identify itself with the Catholic parish of Our Lady of Dolours Glasnevin. Go to Killeigh County Offaly (which also has a Na Fianna team) however and the GAA fixtures are published in the Catholic parish newsletter.

The recent history of the digitisation of the Catholic parishes goes back to the summer of 2008 when (in my capacity as IBC’s social researcher) I was able to offer a short summer studentship to Omar Sarhan, as part of his MSc in GIS & Remote Sensing at NUIM. Omar spent six weeks or so trying to source or devise a method by which we could digitally represent Diocesan and parish data. The Bishops’ Conference had a need for it and here was the opportunity to ally my own underdeveloped geographical imagination and his technical skill. Omar’s enthusiasm in June 2008 was hard to keep up with. The digitisation of the 26 Catholic Diocesan boundaries was attained in a few weeks; a short time later, he had attached 2006 Census data to the new shape files and we were away and running. In my role as social researcher with the Conference, I tried to convey this enthusiasm to the secretaries of each Diocese asking each of them to cooperate in any way they could with the next task: digitising parish boundaries. In Ireland, we might like to talk about The Church but this project points to almost 26 Catholic Churches in Ireland.

The physical and financial constraints of the job became apparent when we realised we would have to visit Diocesan offices across Ireland. This was not going to happen and so we dedicated Omar’s time to a handful who had responded to the initial request for assistance. Kildare & Leighlin, Waterford & Lismore and Killala were our hastily-adopted models of good practice. Aside from this, Omar had a map of Cashel & Emly’s parishes drawn by a team of nuns in 1972 and Paddy Duffy’s Landscapes of South Ulster to go on. Progress at this stage was fairly slow but satisfying. Omar confronted three main challenges in the digitisation of parish boundaries:

1. the unavailability of paper boundary maps with significant georeferenced features
2. the relative unimportance of systematic mapping to Diocesean work
3. the relative importance of mental maps in defining the parish.

This was no longer just a question of remotely drawing a line from here to there but the building of a new epistemological framework. Rather than see our task as one of McKinderian division, the boundaries became the subject of local negotiation combining history, geomorphology and politics. It was not as if we made the mistake of thinking we could land in from Maynooth, spread out our maps on a large table over tea and ask the local cleric where the parish begins and ends. The very definition of the parish itself came into question: “well now, that depends” was not an untypical reply to our original question. Many of the dioceses had tourist-style maps of their parishes, while a small number had more detailed paper-based maps. Scanning, georeferencing and then tidying up such maps was a time consuming business in itself but over all of this was a single problem. No matter where we put the lines, the local parishes were less defined lines and more mental constructs.

Four years later, the project now involves UCC’s cartographer, Ordnance Survey Ireland and the Department of Geography NUIM. The work conducted by Mike Murphy in UCC has involved using townlands to create what we believe are the Catholic parishes across the island. This time consuming work involves dissolving the relevant townland boundaries using standard GIS applications. We need to take what has been done and verify them with each diocese using 1:50,000 scale OSi maps. We’ve agreed that this represents a kind of ‘tidal mark’ of our knowledge because the parish boundaries are changing faster now than they have in the last century. For example, Waterford city’s parishes have been changed by the construction of the N25 bridge. The Catholic Church in Ireland is grouping parishes in response to changing needs but none of that can be achieved if mapping is only about drawing lines. It is about people’s understanding of their own area, again more oral than cartographic.

What is change anyway?

Last week, I was listening to my OH’s mother’s stories from her childhood. This is a woman who grew up in rural Leitrim in a time of radio and long drop toilets. She was recalling how people would call to her family home during the evening time and tell stories and share gossip. These visits of course generated their own stories. Inevitably perhaps, there was a little conversation about the decline of domestic story telling and the rise of the television. Which got me thinking: how do neighbourly concerns and stories get folded into national concerns? I mean it is not as if our everyday experiences are spatially or temporally nested like Matryoshka dolls, the local into the regional, the national and international. Briefly, where exactly do anecdotes about Jimmy Frank’s outdoor toilet cease to have a relevance? I inarticulately introduced this into a later conversation with OH but I needed to keep my eye on the road.

On Tuesday morning last, the report of the Advisory Group to the Forum on Patronage and Pluralism in the Primary Sector was released. Aside from it being a nice little headline-earner for Quinn as he attended the INTO annual conference, it is not an insignificant report. Certainly in the first twenty pages or so, the Group’s overview of the development of primary education in Ireland threw up some surprises, to me. For example, religious ethos being distributed across the school curriculum came only in political moves of the late 1960s: a certain consolidation by the Catholic bishops in the face of seeming momentous alterations in the political landscape.

As is stated in the text above, such a development represents a “significant change” in a few different things. Change is a repeated theme in the first section of the  report. On a simple accounting, the word ‘change’ appears 93 times in the document.

The changed character of the population is evidenced in Section II of this Report. p.1

The cultivation of trust and confidence in the process of transition is important so that people can understand the rationale for change and the values for the common good… p.3

Regarding the administration of primary schools a striking feature of the political changeover was the lack of change, and the continuity of the inherited tradition of primary schooling. p.10

No significant policy changes affecting Irish primary education took place thereafter until the 1960s. The sixties was a period of significant political, economic, social, cultural and demographic change. p.13

You get the idea. What strikes me on reading this first part of a very well written document is the notion of change as being symbolic to the stories we all tell collectively or, in the content of primary educational policy, ‘nationally’. Change in Ireland, like Obama’s 2008 Hope, is reserved for some elements of political life in Ireland. A change in policy to favour land speculation is not considered Change although it represents one of the turning points of our recent history. Under what conditions does Change happen in Ireland and most particularly where does it happen?

Change in this sense is too static a conception of how we notice things being one way and then becoming another way, over time. Change for the Advisory Group is a grab bag of assumptions which occludes the lived reality of people’s everyday life where symbolic and actual violence was evident. There is a story in Ireland about how Change occurred in the 1960s and 1970s: where women bought condoms and brought them to Dublin on a train, where telephones became more widely available in homes and Phil Lynott came from London a hero. In this narrative, change occurs on many scales and in different places at different times, e.g. Leitrim is temporally ‘behind’ Mount Merrion. Places coexist but differentially access something called Change, because where ‘we are now’ is the achieved terminus of progress. I might call this a Reeling In The Years phenomenon. It is not as if people in these places wake up and say to themselves ”that new measure that Maurice O’Doherty read on the news last night? That’s going to change things from today!”  This is a really difficult narrative to employ when talking about changes to primary provision in Ireland or how a Change in religious practice occurs over time.

What is this Change? Can you yet tell that I’m struggling with this?  

Armies for No Religion

You may have noticed that I’ve been tweeting in the last week about the first results from the Republic’s census. For policy and research twonks like me, the release dates of census data in Ireland are good days. They’re good days because we all get to see the results of a counting process across a fairly stable and unified stadial unit called Ireland. They’re also good days because most of tweeting is now done in grumpy political mode. You’ll also know that I work for an organisation called the Catholic Church in Ireland and so the data have a direct relevance to the kinds of things that this organisation likes to do.

So here are the headlines:

• 3.86m people (84.2%) of people living in Ireland defined themselves as Roman Catholic in April 2011.
• This is a decrease on the 87% who did so in 2006.
• Due to general population increase, however, just under 180,000 more people define themselves as Catholic than in 2006.
• The next largest religious grouping is the Church of Ireland/Anglican Communion with 129,039 people (2.8% of the population).
• There are 49,204 (1.1%) Muslims living in the state.
• The Orthodox Church in Ireland and other Christian religions have 45,223 and 41,165 adherents respectively (about 1% of the population each).
• A large group of people (269,811, 6%) chose the ‘No Religion’ category, a 45% increase on 2006 (83,493 people).
• A further 3,905 people chose ‘Agnostic’ and 3,521 chose ‘Atheist’.

In one way, this list is as meaningless as enumerating the numbers of people who are left or right handed. I mean, having found out that 4% fewer of the population states that they are not Roman Catholic is not really one can individually do anything about. But you see my employers are in that business: evangelisation. In another way, the numbers mean an awful lot because they have implications for the ways a government controls its legitimate (?) use of violence. Catholics have no reason to be smug, well, at least most of them. Just because they’re in a statistical majority does not mean that temporal authority flows from this. As it happens, about 45% of the people who call themselves Catholic regularly attend to their beliefs. This is of course of great concern to those in leadership positions (however that is minimally construed) within the Church. It is not that practice makes perfect but merely that intentionality should form some central part of a faith. One of the significant issues that the Catholic Church in Ireland faces is a lack of intentionality: it has been said before but a smaller church would be a better church. Until this intentionality thing gets a little more phenomenological and a little less theological, some argue, there is no ‘renewal’.

I do not think that No Religion should be included in the census question: What is your Religion? If you have no such category in the question, you merely subtract the total population from those who ticked one of the choices in this question. There you go CSO: that one’s for free. However, to state as Atheist Ireland have that:

the true figure for nonreligious people is likely to be much higher, based both on the reality of living in Ireland, and a leading census question that assumed that everyone had a religion and merely asked them what that religion was.

In what sense is the census not ‘reality’? If the true figure for nonreligious people is likely much higher, how does that separate Atheist Ireland from a bishop who is concerned that the 45% Mass attendance figure is not ‘the reality’ in his Diocese? And, as thrashed out in a chance meeting with Kevin Hargaden, why aggregate the No Religions with Atheists and Agnostics unless you mean to lead the ranks of massed No Religionists? Aggregation would imply intentionality which seems to me to imply a faith in something. A faith in the sense that all of those who ticked the No Religion, Atheist and Agnostic choices had a shared understanding of what this means. Do 84% of people in Ireland believe in the unquestioned authority of their bishops? No. Do 3.86 million people in Ireland share the same faith of a Peter McVerry or a David Quinn? No.

I think people ticking No Religion in the Census is a good thing. If nothing else it means more interesting conversation on street corners, in pubs and outside churches. But in the same manner as a Catholic leader should take no comfort from a “mere” 4% drop in the proportion of Roman Catholics in Ireland given all that we have read in the last ten years (because to do so would imply a crude imperialism ), atheism cannot ‘claim’ No Religionists. I would blame the CSO for this: not Atheist Ireland.

EDIT: Susie Donnelly has indicated that she does not mind her work being put online. Thanks Susie.

Census 2011

This is the text of the blogpost that I put together  for Ireland After Nama. It is about the release of the first tranche of data from Census 2011 this morning. As you may have discovered, while discussing these data with Colin McGovern and Michael Nugent on twitter, I imply no triumphalism or statistical hegemony to the high proportion of people in Ireland that tick the Roman Catholic box. Regular blog readers will know that I have no time for this.

Census 2011: Religion and belief

3.86m people (84.2%) of people living in Ireland defined themselves as Roman Catholic in April 2011, a decrease on the 87% who did so in 2006.  Due to general population increase, however, just under 180,000 more people define themselves as Catholic than in 2006.

The next largest religious grouping is the Church of Ireland/Anglican Communion with 129,039 people (2.8%).

There were 49,204 (1.1%) Muslims living in the state.  The Orthodox Church in Ireland and other Christian religions have 45,223 and 41,165 adherents respectively (about 1% of the population each).

However, a large group of people (269,811, 6%) chose the ‘No Religion’ category, a 45% increase on 2006 (83,493 people).  A further 3,905 people chose ‘Agnostic’ and 3,521 chose ‘Atheist’.  Taken together, Agnostic, Atheist and No Religion, total  277,237 people. The low numbers defining themselves as Agnostic or Atheist might be explained by the fact that it is a written choice, not a distinct, listed category on the census form unlike ‘No Religion’.

Where are the high growth areas for the largest religion in the state? Cavan (12.6%), Laois (15.8%) and Longford (11%) saw double digit growth in Catholics since 2006, all of which saw strong general population growth.  Urban areas in contrast, such as Dublin (1.7%) and Waterford City (2.8%) saw relatively small increases in the numbers of Catholics.

In Dublin, 8.9% of people selected ‘No Religion’.  It was 7.9% in Wicklow county, and percentages of between 5 and 6.2% in Clare, Leitrim, Kildare, Cork and Galway.  The lowest rates were in Monaghan with 2.4% and Offaly with 2.55%.

Finally to the matter of the nationality of those in the various religious groups. A decade and a half of in-migration has altered the religious landscape. For example, of the 3.86m Roman Catholics in Ireland, 282,799 (7.3%) are non-Irish nationals.  184,066 of these are from EU27 nationalities other than UK and Ireland.  39.5% of Muslims in Ireland are Irish nationals, meaning that a substantial minority of the Muslim population in Ireland is composed of Irish nationals.

Prezent

Here’s the prezi file I created for my paper at the Association of American Geographers conference held in New York last month. Prezi is a good presentation tool but as you know yourself, you have to start with content and plan it in advance before approaching any kind of presentation tool.  It may not make much sense without the paper but that’s on its way.  I thought the session was a good one and formed the first part of a GORABS-sponsored double header. The only problem with my own session was that because I chaired it, I neglected to allocate time to field questions for my own paper. I blame The Nerves.

It was a pleasure to meet up with people interested in the kinds of things I am interested in. I managed to connect with Prof Lily Kong who I would like to externally examine my thesis. Watch this space. In particular it was good to meet Claire Dwyer, Katherine Akin and Richard Gale.