Automated Boundary Creation: Atomic Small Areas in Ireland

This paper describes the creation of a set of small-areas for the reporting of census data in the Republic of Ireland. The current areas used for reporting the results of the quinquennial population censuses are known as Electoral Divisions; they are large compared with similar reporting areas in Northern Ireland, they have widely varying populations and considerable internal social heterogeneity which makes them unsuitable for a wide variety of planning tasks. We describe an automated method of creating a suitable census geography which uses existing digital map and gazetteer data. We describe its structure and operation, validation and its application to nationwide. The areas have a prescribed minimum size, are designed to be consistently small, nest into the existing ED geography, cover the whole country, are constrained by natural boundaries, use streets as their unifying feature, and are reasonably homogenous.