INSPIRE Geoportal
Settlements
In order to distinguish between the urban and rural population for census analysis, the boundaries of distinct settlements needs to be defined. This requires the creation of suburbs and extensions to existing cities and legal towns as well as delineating boundaries for settlements which are not legally defined (called Census towns).Historically, for the censuses of 1926 to 1951, a census town was defined simply as a cluster of twenty or more houses and the precise delimination of the town was left to the discretion of the invidual enumerator concerned. As part of the general review of towns for the 1956 Census, the boundaries for the census towns were drawn up in consultation with the various Local Authorities applying uniform principles in all areas of the country. The definition of a census town was changed at the 1956 Census, from twenty houses to twenty occupied houses; this definition was also applied at the 1961 and 1966 Censuses.From 1971 to 2006, Census towns were defined as a cluster of fifty or more occupied dwellings where, within a radius of 800 metres there was a nucleus of thirty occupied dwellings (on both sides of a road, or twenty on one side of a road), along with a clearly defined urban centre e.g. a shop, a school, a place of worship or a community centre. Census town boundaries where extended over time where there was an occupied dwelling within 200 metres of the existing boundary.To avoid the agglomeration of adjacent towns caused by the inclusion of low density one off dwellings on the approach routes to towns, the 2011 criteria were tightened, in line with UN criteria.In Census 2016, a new Census town was defined as there being a minimum of 50 occupied dwellings, with a maximum distance between any dwelling and the building closest to it, of 100 metres, and where there was evidence of an urban centre (shop, school etc.). The proximity criteria for extending existing 2006 Census town boundaries was also amended to include all occupied dwellings within 100 metres of an existing building. Other information based on OSi mapping and orthogonal photography was also taken into account when extending boundaries. Boundary extensions were generally made to include the land parcel on whihc a dwelling was built or using other physical features such as roads, paths, etc. Census towns which previously combined legal towns and their environs have been newly defined using the standard census town criteria (with the 100 metres proximity rule). For some towns the impact of this has been to lose area and population, compared with previous computations.
Simple
- Alternate title
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Census Towns
- Date (Creation)
- 2008-01-01
- Date (Revision)
- 2017-06-17
- Date (Publication)
- 2017-06-20
- Citation identifier
- CSO / SU.IE.CSO.Settlements
- Citation identifier
- CSO / SU.VectorStatisticalUnit
- Purpose
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To produce statistics for Ireland
- Status
- On going
- Point of contact
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Organisation name Individual name Electronic mail address Role Central Statistics Office
Point of contact
- Maintenance and update frequency
- As needed
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General Multilingual Environmental Thesaurus - Concepts, version 4.1.3
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statistical information
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- Place
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Ireland
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- Specific usage
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Statistical units INSPIRE
- User contact info
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Organisation name Individual name Electronic mail address Role Central Statistics Office
User
- Access constraints
- Other restrictions
- Other constraints
- no limitations to public access
- Use constraints
- Other restrictions
- Other constraints
- no conditions to access and use
- Other constraints
- CC BY 4.0
- Other constraints
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This layer is published under the terms of the license Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). [ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ ]
- Spatial representation type
- Vector
- Distance
- 1 m
- Language
- English
- Character set
- UTF8
- Topic category
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- Boundaries
- Society
))
- Unique resource identifier
- IRENET95 / Irish Transverse Mercator
- Unique resource identifier
- EPSG:4258 (ETRS89 geographical coordinates)
- Distribution format
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Name Version gml+xml 3.2
- Distributor contact
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Organisation name Individual name Electronic mail address Role Ordnance Survey Ireland
Publisher
- OnLine resource
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Protocol Linkage Name ATOM Syndication Format
https://osi-inspire-atom.s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/StatisticalUnits/StatisticalUnits_ServiceATOM.xml CSO Ireland INSPIRE Download Service ATOM
- Hierarchy level
- Dataset
Conformance result
- Date (Publication)
- 2014-12-31
- Pass
- No
Conformance result
- Statement
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Settlement boundaries are reviewed every 5 years. If a new settlement is created or an existing settlement is extended, the boundary is drawn by snapping along features such as roads, centre-lines and land parcels, where applicable. Settlements boundaries are not legally defined. Invalid geometry checks, polygon checks and unique ID checks were run using Data Reviewer in ArcMap 10.5.1. Ungeneralised and generalised (20m, 50m & 100m) versions are available in the ITM projection.
Metadata
- File identifier
- {BF6E5BB4-B843-4478-A1CC-7AFE350EC583} XML
- Metadata language
- English
- Character set
- UTF8
- Hierarchy level
- Dataset
- Date stamp
- 2024-05-20T00:00:00
- Metadata standard name
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COMMISSION REGULATION (EC) Nº 1205/2008 of INSPIRE Directive
- Metadata standard version
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TG 2.0
- Metadata author
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Organisation name Individual name Electronic mail address Role Central Statistics Office
Point of contact
Overviews
Spatial extent
Provided by
