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Top-level
 2. First of all, some clarification on terms: Ireland is an island in the north Atlantic. The island is divided between the country Ireland ๐ฎ๐ช (รire in Irish, and 14 comments
4. One famous example of border oddness is "the Drummully Polyp", an Irish ๐ฎ๐ช pene-exclave. The only road access is via Northern Ireland ๐ฌ๐ง. https://www.openstreetmap.org/?mlat=54.1575&mlon=-7.3104#map=11/54.1575/-7.3104 5. Like the border itself, the UK ๐ฌ๐ง and Ireland ๐ฎ๐ช share a long, complicated and intertwined history. Irish citizens have permanent right to live and work in the UK. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_nationality_law_and_the_Republic_of_Ireland 6. Ireland ๐ฎ๐ช and the UK ๐ฌ๐ง do however disagree on some points. Ireland does not recognise the UK's claim to Rockall, an uninhabited tiny island in the North Atlantic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockall BTW - there was some recent Rockall news: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/jul/21/rockall-atlantic-chris-cameron-survival-gear (and yes, we do have an alert set for Rockall news. Obvs) 7. Ireland ๐ฎ๐ช itself makes some quite aggressive maritime claims 8. As alluded to earlier, in Ireland ๐ฎ๐ช two languages has official status: Irish and English. While English is more widely used generally, several areas are designated as "Gaeltacht" where special measures are taken to try to reinforce Irish. 9. Ireland ๐ฎ๐ช was the last country in Europe to introduce a national postal code system. Called "Eircodes", national postcodes where introduced only in 2014 and are still not widely used. Sadly Eircodes are not open data, which means using them at scale (for example for geocoding) requires a license and paying a licensing fee ๐ฌ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_addresses_in_the_Republic_of_Ireland#Eircode 10. The island of Ireland was historically divided into about 61,000 "townlands", a small geographical division of land of Gaelic origin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Townland Mapping them has been a very long-running project inthe OpenStreetMap Ireland community https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Ireland/Mapping_Townlands 12. Wrapping things up, you may be surprised to learn of New Ireland, a province of Papua New Guinea ๐ต๐ฌ on the other side of the world from Ireland ๐ฎ๐ช. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Ireland_Province New Ireland was a correct answer in the April 2023 #fridaygeotrivia competition where we asked about states/provinces named after countries they are not part of: 13. That's it for our look at ๐ฎ๐ช Ireland's #geoweirdness. Thanks for reading and boosting. What did we overlook? We have more threads about specific countries, border disputes, geocoding, etc on our blog. 14. Final bonus toot - Ireland ๐ฎ๐ช of course has a rich musical tradition, and has gifted the world with some of the best songs about geocoding. We close with U2's "Where the Streets Have No Name"  So, in fact, there isn't really a border that could be policed. Statistically, people can cross every 1.66 kilometers. Just like the Hadrian's Wall of old in Britain, there is one country with the remnants of an archaic border... |
Gregory's Server
3. Ireland ๐ฎ๐ช is part of the EU ๐ช๐บ, and the land border and freedom of movement with the UK ๐ฌ๐ง proved to be a tricky point to resolve in Brexit negotiations.
The "border" itself is 499km long with about 300 crossings, often entirely unmarked.
https://www.belfastlive.co.uk/news/belfast-news/gallery/border-lines-between-uk-ireland-16678901
#geoweirdness