WHAT impact did partition have on the demographics of Ireland?
As we edge closer to the 100th anniversary of the separation of this island, a Belfast-based tech company believes it has the key to offer new insights into the significant upheaval of a century ago.
The Sensible Code Company has worked with everyone from the UN and The World Bank to media companies and government agencies to process and analyse data.
Now the Ormeau Baths-based firm has, in collaboration with the Central Statistics Office Ireland, pulled the data from the 1901 and 1911 censuses of Ireland into its software called Cantabular.
Records from those censuses are freely available online, but the company has collated it to support real-time analysis that tell us the story of Ireland in a new more in-depth way.
Cavan native Aidan McGuire isn’t aware of such a project being done anywhere else in the world.
“We’re not reproducing the National Archive of Ireland data, that’s a really fantastic website for researching your family tree,” he said.
What the company has done, is use its software to produce localised reports, for example the age profile or employment type of a certain townland or electoral area.
“If you’re a historian or a human geographer, rather than go and look at the original reports, which is very tedious, we’ve produced something where you can go and just run a query.
“It also allows you to create reports that weren’t possible at the time,” he said.
“For example, one of things that was widely commented on in the 1926 census was the decline in Church of Ireland population between 1911 and 1926.
“That number is widely speculated about. A lot of people have a lot of opinions about that. What this work enables historians to, is to look at that population in detail.”
He said if the data from the 1926 census was made available in the same way as the 1901 and 1911 censuses, Cantabular could produce an instant comparison of the changing religious demographics by area.
“Or you could analyse where the Irish speakers were and what was their age profile,” said Aidan.
He said the data points to a drop in Donegal’s Irish speaking population between 1901 and 1911, with many new Irish speakers popping up in Belfast by 1911, suggesting a considerable movement of people in those years.
It also shows thriving communities and populations in border townlands before partition.
“We’re not giving any commentary on the data, that’s not our objective. All we’re trying to is recreate the original reports and make them available so that people who understand the nuances of the data can potentially produce a better analysis.
“In the end our hope is that another organization would take this and make it available to the general public.”
Raised in Kilnaleck in Co Cavan and with grandparents from the border area, Aidan is particularly interested in the make-up of border communities.
“Either one of them could kick a football to the other. One was in Fermanagh, near Kinawley, the other was in Cavan, near Bawnboy.
“I remember growing up my father talking about these places, but you can go there now and they’re pretty much abandoned.
“But when you look back at the 1911 census I can see 90 families there. These were quite vibrant communities up until we have partition.
“Using this tool you can get a better sense of what those communities were like.”
In his younger days he played football for St Pat’s College in Cavan and his local GAA club Crosserlough, before leaving to study in Trinity.
He went on to spend a lifetime in the north-west of England, working and raising a family.
By 2010, he had co-founded the Sensible Code Company in Liverpool with his sister Aine McGuire and Julian Todd
Their new company originally focused on open data and scraping – “programmatically gathering information from the web”, explained Aidan.
Julian Todd was well versed in scraping data. In 2003 he co-founded Public Whip, which was developed to record how MPs voted on the invasion of Iraq in terms of party whip
That project later gave rise to ‘TheyWorkForYou’, the website which monitors speeches and votes within Parliament and the devolved assemblies.
The McGuire clan’s time in Liverpool ended in 2018 when Aidan relocated the business to Belfast and resettled his family in north Down.
With the Sensible Code Company involved in the EU research programme Horizon 2020, Brexit had significant implications.
“We evaluated different locations and we came to a view that Belfast would be a good location for us to serve both our UK clients and our European clients.”
The company still has a team of ten people working remotely from various locations around Europe.
Momentum is continuing to build behind the small team, with major government and global organisations increasingly taking notice.
“We enable statistical disclosure control on the fly, that’s the technical innovation,” adds Aidan.
On April 29, the company will host an online event to demonstrate how Cantabular works for everyone from historians and social scientists to archivists and census teams.
The map visualisation above is created using individual household data from the 1911 Census of Population of Ireland, which are publicly available, collected with permission from the
[ National Archives of IrelandOpens in new window ]
. Since the individual household data are no longer subject to statistical confidentiality constraints, the dataset provides an ideal basis for demonstrating directly the statistical impact of the statistical disclosure control procedures deployed when using the Cantabular software. The completeness of the dataset and its use for statistical purposes has yet to be fully verified and hence any analyses presented are for demonstration purposes only and should not be quoted for statistical purposes.
