Published 10 January 2026
Northern Ireland can be a confusing and complex place, politically sensitive and with an equally complex history. To paraphrase a Canadian Prime Minister, if his country had too much geography, then this place had too much history.[1] Whether it has too much history or not, it is a fascinating place. Geographically beautiful, with a world heritage site at the Giant’s Causeway, the wonderful Glens of Antrim and the Victorian city of Belfast, where the Titanic was built. It is truly the land of giants, from Cú Chulainn to Seamus Heaney, a place that punches above its weight beyond its geographic size and population.
The description of place is a contentious issue in Ireland (and elsewhere) due to the anglicisation of the Irish names. Even the name “Northern Ireland” is not agreed. It is used by Britain and the British but not recognised by those opposed to the political entity created by the Government of Ireland Act of 1920 to secure a unionist, protestant majority opposed to Home Rule. Those who do not accept the Partition of Ireland tend to refer to The North rather than Northern Ireland, the latter being seen as a political description and considered tacit acceptance of what had led to the Civil War and more recently contributed to the thirty-year-long “Troubles”. While it is often used to make a political point, it is also used frequently and colloquially in all parts of the island with no political edge. Throughout this work I use the various names of Northern Ireland interchangeably; sometimes Northern Ireland is used where some formality is required, or the North or the six counties where a more informal usage is appropriate. The use of Ulster is neither historically, geographically, nor politically correct, as that is a province of the island of Ireland consisting of nine counties.
The name of southern Ireland can be equally awkward at times, the problem (if it is that) arising from the historical constitutional claim to the whole island by the Dublin Government, which added to the confusion and the troubles until it was repealed after the Good Friday / Belfast Agreement 1999. Ireland (the South) and the UK (British) government remain in dispute over the names of their respective countries and jurisdictions, the first objecting to the existence of a separate Northern Ireland entity, the second objecting to the use of Ireland as the country’s name. The formal name of the twenty-six counties of the southern part of the island has evolved over the years as the Irish Constitution has changed, from the Free State – referring to the entity that emerged instead of Southern Ireland as proposed under the Government of Ireland Act, 1920 – to Ireland (Éire in Irish) under the Constitution of Ireland of 1937. The Irish government does not like using the Republic of Ireland, or just the Republic, seeing it as a description rather than its name.
I walk through this maze trying to plot a sensible path but fear not everyone will agree with me. So, I use the South, southern Ireland or the twenty-six counties informally, and depending on the period, I use the Free State or Ireland when I think its formal use is more appropriate or there is no chance of confusion as to which entity I am referring to. As the Economist style guide puts it – “Ireland is simply Ireland. Although it is a republic, it is not the Republic of Ireland. Neither is it, in English, Eire.” [2] Finally, I will use Ireland, all-Ireland or the island of Ireland when I want to refer to the geographic entity that is the whole island.
I have hyphenated the words place-name in general use, but the words are joined when describing the organisations involved in determining place-names, as in the Irish Placenames Branch.
If that was not hard enough, we have the names of the three survey organisations that resulted from the partition of Ireland. For most of the nineteenth century, the Ordnance Survey in Ireland had been referred to as the Ordnance Survey Office, Dublin, thus distinguishing it from the British part of the operation. It was all one organisation, with headquarters first at the Tower of London, then in Southampton, and for a short period at Chessington. In Ireland, after 1922, the Northern Survey Department became the Ordnance Survey of Northern Ireland, and the Dublin office continued to refer to itself as the Ordnance Survey Office, sometimes as the Ordnance Survey of Ireland. In the late 1990s, it changed its name informally to Ordnance Survey Ireland and formalised this in the Ordnance Survey Ireland Act 2000. It remained Ordnance Survey Ireland until it was subsumed into Tailte Eireann in 2023. When I refer to the Ordnance Survey Office, I mean the Southern Ordnance Survey; when I refer to the British Ordnance Survey, I usually refer to the Ordnance Survey Southampton (although it uses Ordnance Survey Great Britain – or OSGB – in international contexts to distinguish it from the other Ordnance Surveys on these islands).
Map scale can be equally confusing, so I have adopted particular conventions to keep things as straightforward as possible. The maps produced before the introduction of metric scales and the Irish Grid (in 1950) are referred to by their imperial units thus: six inches to the mile (shortened to the six-inch map), twenty-five inches to the mile (shortened to the twenty-five-inch map), one inch to the mile (one-inch map), half-inch to the mile (half-inch); and quarter-inch to the mile (or quarter-inch map). The modern maps are referred to by their metric scales, described as 1:1,000, 1:2,500, 1:5,000, 1:10,000, 1:50,000, and 1:250,000. In my narrative, I have inserted a comma between the thousands, although by convention, technical documents produced by the Ordnance Surveys usually omit them. Finally, large scale refers to maps between the scales of 1:1,000 and 1:10,000, and small scale maps from 1:50,000 and smaller. Those in between can be called medium-scale maps.
More mundanely, the Irish currency between 1922 and 1979 was the Irish pound (punt in Irish), which had parity with sterling. The introduction of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1979, which Ireland joined but not the UK, broke its link with sterling and introduced an exchange rate. The Irish pound freely floated from 1979 to 1999 until the Euro replaced it. Footnotes follow the convention Title, Author, publisher, and year of publication. For archives: description, date, archive reference.
[1] “If some countries have too much history, we have too much geography” William Mackenzie King in a speech to the Canadian House of Commons, 18 June 1936.
[2] “The Economist Style Guide”, The Economist, 2005.
