P. Ell
In the mid 1990s the Database of Irish Historical Statistics was created at the Queen's University, Belfast. This is one of the largest quantitative resources on Irish history holding data from the census, poor law and sources through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Database led directly to the publication of an atlas "Mapping the Great Irish Famine" that gave a spatial perspective on the causes and impacts of the Famine in the mid-1840s. At the time the Database was created, however, no attempt was made to build a comprehensive GIS of the changing administrative units of Ireland. This paper reviews plans for creating such a system based on using townlands, a tiny and very stable administrative unit of which there were 60,000 in Ireland. These will be time-enabled and look-up tables created to allow them to be aggregated to create Ireland's larger administrative units, particularly baronies and poor law unions. These can then be linked back to the Database. This paper describes the way that the system is being created and describes its potential.
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