Irish Cheeses

Here's a new years resolution: Eat all of these. I don't know if the colourings have any significance and I don't know if the fact that N Ireland and Dublin are both highlighted but have no chesse named means anything. List of cheeses named are : Beenoskoe, Milleeris, Desmond Gubbeen, Durrus, Coolea, Ardrahan, Baylough Cheddar, St Gall, Ardsallagh, Cashel Blue, Crozier Blue, Cooleeney, Lavistown, Knockdrinna Gold, St Tola Log, Mount Callan, Mossfield Organic, Grace, Glebe Brethan, Bellingham Blue, Corleggy. I have heard of only one of these before "cashel Blue". St Tola Log sounds like something i'll have to try! 

 Source Maps taken from the World Cheese Book, by Juliet Harbutt, published by DK Via http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/markeaston/2009/10/map_of_the_week_cheese.html

Irish student alcohol usage

A map by researchers from the University College Dublin shows how much the average Irish student drinks a year, by county. Students from counties shown in blue drink in excess of 351 units of alcohol a year. Students in Monagh, Donegal, Tiperrary and Carlow drink the least per year - between 200 and 250 units each. 

Snow fall rate in Republic of Ireland

Excellent essay on snowfall in Ireland over the centuries. Map above is for the last 50 years. If im reading the article right then, should NI have been included then they would have the highest level of snow. See article here.  

Twitter geolocation tags mapped onto Irish roads to show volume of traffic.

Got this from the guardian. It does as it says. Its not a map of where people are using twitter but rather of where twitter is used the most when on the road system. Cant see anything of real interest for Irish people only that the busiest road on the Island would appear to the boat leaving Belfast for Scotland! Or though you could argue that people have more time for tweeting on the ferry. The M7/M8 to cork has a blank spot somewhere after Newbridge with everyone turning off the road to cork to go to Carlow. thus Portlaoise to Clonmel is pretty vacant. 

Irish civil war in 1922. Division of the island into republican and free-state areas.

So Dongeal Clare, Laois, Westmeath, Meath, Cavan, Monaghan and parts of other counties were Free-State territories. This is I did not know. To be honest im quite surprised by the amount of territory that the Republicans had. I assumed it was more heavy towards the Free-Staters. I can not remember where i found this map.

Clans and their hereditary links at the time of Henry 8th

I really have no clue what to say here other than click on it and have fun. This is supposedly based on the castles of the various clans around the country. With the colours linked to the origin of the clan. 

Percentage of Catholics in Ireland and Northern Ireland 1926

Don't know the origin of this map saw it on Politics.ie. I'm the process of creating a series of maps using a 1% grading for the religious make up of the island with a 32 county template. The 20% grade used here is somewhat frustrating but the reality is that the percentage of protestants in the Republic was never over 10% (at least after partition) so any maps used to represent this data need a very small grade but that means a lot more shades of colours are needed which is painful to produce.