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Overlapping territories: social and cultural geography in Ireland

In the early 1990s, Fintan O Toole’s book Black Hole, Green Card set out to chart the ‘disappearance of Ireland’ (O Toole 1994). Broadly concerned with the consequences of globalization, Ireland he concluded was a ‘sort of flying island, hovering between a number of different contexts, often flying blind with no one sure how the controls work anymore . . . a place always taking off again and again into its own outer spaces’ (O Toole 1994). O Toole’s anxieties represented well the zeitgeist of that period, when Ireland was undermined by emigration and devastated by unemployment, and years of political violence in Northern Ireland had taken their toll. But in the decade since 1994, the conditions which led O Toole to chart a failing economy and an increasingly borderless Ireland have transformed in ways he and very few others anticipated. In Northern Ireland an uneasy but welcome peace has transformed the quality of life for many. In the South, economic prosperity has precipitated rapid social, environmental and cultural changes. Reflecting on the literature that has attempted to track the outcome of these transformations, this paper will present a short review of the key trends in the geographical work on the island of Ireland. Whilst we are sensitive to the institutional and political differences in both jurisdictions, we hope that, in light of recent political events, a paper that attempts an integrated analysis of the geographical work on both parts of the island will be welcomed. As will become apparent, our intention is to illustrate how the production of geographical knowledge on Ireland reflects the overlapping territories in which the island’s economy, culture and spaces are experienced.