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.

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.

The clapping, always with the clapping.

Is it coy of me or just naive to question the conditions under which a discussion of gay marriage takes place on a topical TV show? Last night as I settled on the couch with a beer (brought by a friend staying the night), I switched over to Channel 4′s 10 O’Clock Live. If you have not seen this, it is like a post-ironic John Craven’s Newsround, hosted by David Mitchell, Lauren Laverne, Charlie Brooker and Jimmy Carr. They had a segment last night following comments by Cardinal Keith O’Brien among others, that passing legislation for gay marriage would be immoral. As an intenvention in political culture on that other island, the Cardinal’s comments are what might be called direct. It might even be fair to say that he put both feet in, studs showing.

The 10 O’Clock Live segment last night (at 28 mins on their catch up service) was some editorialising by David Mitchell by hosting a panel consisting of Boy George, DJ and musician and Milo Yiannopoulos, journalist and blogger. The former was to represent the Yes to Gay Marriage side, the latter the No to Gay Marriage side but of course it is never as simple as all that. So far, so predictable. Mitchell cracked off with some swipes at straight celebrity fickleness over marriage and opens with the “you’re gay Milo but you’re a Catholic, what’s your problem with it?” question. Yiannopoulos performs well from an orthodox Catholic position: it’s not about equality, the gay community doesn’t really want it, straight marriage is the “cohesive glue of society”. Diminution of marriage by extending legal rights to do so would be “breaking down” something which holds society together. I’m not on board with this particular way of looking at things but let’s move on.

George’s opening remarks are a mish mash of various different platitutdes about the word ‘marriage’, marriage is a celebration, albeit a conservative one, and why would he want to stop anyone having one. He uses the words The Church unproblematically (as if everyone knows what he means) but that’s another post. And then it goes back to Mitchell who takes Yiannopoulos up on the distinction between words and concepts. Here’s where it gets a little more nebulous though: Yiannopoulos makes a point about political posturing and the relationship between the Conservative party and UKIP but then George comes back in with “it’s [not quite clear which 'it'] such a non-issue, who cares?” to which he receives whooping and clapping. He then quotes John Waters who is paraphrased “anything that pisses off the Catholic Church is a good thing” to more applause. Yiannopoulos does give a charitable smile and then admits to having a complicated relationship to god. George then unhelpfully declares that his god helps him pick curtains.

At this stage it became apparent that putting a journalist who wanted to defend his faith up against a DJ was a little disingenuous on the part of the producers of the show. George declares that growing up gay is difficult yes, but if he had a choice he would choose it again. More applause. He wants Yiannopoulos to be happy to be gay. Yiannopoulos declares that he is not because he feels alienated from the ways in which his sexuality is represented to which George replies that “he should be” happy to be gay. To me, Boy George has a conflict about Yiannopoulos, who is gay but not entirely happy to be so. Yiannopoulos of course has a conflict and admits to it through his writing: he is a Catholic but also a gay man. George wants us to own our life experience “you know this is what I am”. By the tone of the audience, it would seem to be a popular position to hold. This is why my interest is piqued.

Are we self-owning subjects? If I am ‘comfortable’ with who I am, does that make it mine? Do I own my self? I am interested in these questions because I am not sure that we do own (in the sense of legal entitlement) our selves. (There is a whole lot more going on in this segment and yes, positionality as a straight man who works for the Catholic church and all of that.) I would argue that the self-owning subject is the outcome of a definably political process which separates mind from body, my subjectivity from my ‘objectivity’ in place; a process that leads to particular necessary conflicts being tolerated and others not being so welcome. Is there only one way to be a gay man so that being Catholic as well is trumped by the former identity? I doubt that many would accept the assertion that there is only one way to be a gay man. So why is there only one way to be religious, i.e. out of time, conflicted, out of step with us? Can Yiannopoulos not be conflicted about himself and admit to it in public? Yiannopoulos is accused of being a self-loathing gay man: on whose terms? At base, there’s an insecurity in Boy George’s reaction to Yiannopoulos’s conflict. It reveals something about European political spaces and religious belief. I don’t know the answers to these questions yet.

 

How far is ‘too far’ again?

Someone called Baroness Warsi has penned a piece in this morning’s Daily Telegraph, my attention to which was drawn by a tweet by C4 news reader Cathy Newman. Notwithstanding the fact that I link to the Telegraph and that I struggle to find a justification for “fighting for faith”, this is not an unfamiliar argument in Ireland. Recalling the visit by Margaret Thatcher to the Vatican some three decades ago, therefore aligning herself with a seamless tradition of shameless self-promotion, Warsi argues that her leading a Vatican visit “is about recognising the deep and intrinsic role of faith here in Britain and overseas” and that she “profoundly believe[s] that faith has a vital and important role to play in modern society”. (The lack of actual facts to back this up makes it more egregious still.) The fact that her delegation is heading to Rome and not Makkah or Salt Lake City should not be lost on us. Warsi’s declaration of intent goes on to argue “for Europe to become more confident and more comfortable in its Christianity”. Now we’re getting closer.

It is suggested that closing the Irish embassy to the Vatican state was a smokescreen for other matters, namely the closure of two others in East Timor (remember them?) and Tehran. This might be right but the issue remains alive only because a substantial number of FG TDs think this is one they believe they can ‘win’. Goodness knows that they’ll not win much else with billions being used to prop up non-existent banks. This morning it rumbles on with Gilmore stating that he might review this closure, as if we are are all waiting with breath abated for such an announcement. It now seems that Gilmore is a willing accomplice in this distracting and overtly stupid public discussion.  The standard criticism from FG deputies (and others) is that the closure of the embassy is a step too far and ‘so soon after Enda’s speech rebuking the Vatican’ for its inaction over abuse. Talk of rosary beads being swung in the air is all very jolly stuff for the idiocratic fourth estate that maintains itself in Leinster House but there’s a bigger point to me made here.

For Europe to retain its ‘Christian heritage’ and to foster the values that are apparently understood by all is to draw attention to those who are not Christian as problematic. If Europe is a Christian space then Muslims and others are not really European. Asad maintains (OK, Kevin I’ll bring it in tomorrow) that Islam is seen as a carrier civilization by those who espouse an epistemology of bounded ‘Europe’ . It brings problems with itself into the European political space from ‘outside’. Those who are insufficiently European need to conform  to ‘our’ dress codes and ways of behaving. (Lentin and Titley draw upon the narratives around the politics of anxious queuing among their many fine examples.) Europe is Christian so everywhere else is merely playing catch up. ‘Their’ dress, food prep and other basic rituals are problematic so a restatement of Europe as Christian space means that we do not have to dialogue, merely reject. Islam ‘carries’ culture according to this way of telling the story; the religious aspects are but codes for other ways of life which we can no longer criticise for fear of being ‘politically incorrect’.

The overreaction (fighting for faith) implicit in Warsi’s argument is that  secularisation has taken totalised control over something called ‘our culture’, as if this is universally agreed upon and can the elide massive gulfs of experience and knowledge that exist between a ministry to working class communities in Leeds and the kind of high church that Warsi admires so much (from under a mantilla?). This from an MP in a parliament that draws upon its legitimacy from a regent who is the head of a church. A reaction such as we have seen from Warsi in England and Creighton and Matthews  here relies on a narrative that ‘things have swung too far the other way’.  We see this again and again in the writing of John Waters and Mary Kenny: I used to be a radical but then I grew up. This has the additional effect of unifying people around the notion that we all know and agree what religious faith is and that there is ‘a place’ for it in something normatively constituted as a public sphere. In short, the privatisation of religious life suits neoliberalism far more than the interests of those with a religious conviction.

Not only should we reject FGs attempts to recast what the secular and the faithful are but also the racialising tendency that Europe is a Christian political space.  These are rallying calls for a very different political battle, one which Christians should be exceptionally cautious about.