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Top-level
 3. Ireland 🇮🇪 is part of the EU 🇪🇺, and the land border and freedom of movement with the UK 🇬🇧 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 13 comments
5. Like the border itself, the UK 🇬🇧 and Ireland 🇮🇪 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 🇮🇪 and the UK 🇬🇧 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 🇮🇪 itself makes some quite aggressive maritime claims 8. As alluded to earlier, in Ireland 🇮🇪 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 🇮🇪 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 😬 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 🇵🇬 on the other side of the world from Ireland 🇮🇪. 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 🇮🇪 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 🇮🇪 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
4. One famous example of border oddness is "the Drummully Polyp", an Irish 🇮🇪 pene-exclave.
The only road access is via Northern Ireland 🇬🇧.
https://www.openstreetmap.org/?mlat=54.1575&mlon=-7.3104#map=11/54.1575/-7.3104
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drummully
#geoweirdness