Portlaoise, County Laois
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Portlaoise, County Laois
Portlaoise ( ), or Port Laoise (), is the county town of County Laois, Ireland. It is located in the Midland Region, Ireland, South Midlands in the province of Leinster. The 2016 census shows that the town's population increased by 9.5% to 22,050, which was well above the national average of 3.8%. It is the most populous and also the most densely populated town in the Midland Region, Ireland, Midland Region, which has a total population of 292,301 at the 2016 census. This also makes it the fastest growing of the top 20 largest towns and cities in Ireland. It was an important town in the medieval period, as the site of the Fort of Maryborough, a fort built by English settlers in the 16th century during the Plantations of Ireland#Early plantations (1556–1576), Plantation of Queen's County. Portlaoise is fringed by the Slieve Bloom Mountains, Slieve Bloom mountains to the west and north-west and the Great Heath of Maryborough to the east. It is notable for its architecture, engine ...
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Town
A town is a human settlement. Towns are generally larger than villages and smaller than cities, though the criteria to distinguish between them vary considerably in different parts of the world. Origin and use The word "town" shares an origin with the German word , the Dutch word , and the Old Norse . The original Proto-Germanic word, *''tūnan'', is thought to be an early borrowing from Proto-Celtic *''dūnom'' (cf. Old Irish , Welsh ). The original sense of the word in both Germanic and Celtic was that of a fortress or an enclosure. Cognates of ''town'' in many modern Germanic languages designate a fence or a hedge. In English and Dutch, the meaning of the word took on the sense of the space which these fences enclosed, and through which a track must run. In England, a town was a small community that could not afford or was not allowed to build walls or other larger fortifications, and built a palisade or stockade instead. In the Netherlands, this space was a garden, mor ...
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Irish Standard Time
Republic of Ireland, Ireland uses Irish Standard Time (IST, UTC+01:00; ga, Am Caighdeánach Éireannach) in the summer months and Greenwich Mean Time (UTC+00:00; ''Meán-Am Greenwich'') in the winter period. (Roughly half of the state is in the 7.5°W to 22.5°W sector, half is in the same sector as Greenwich: 7.5°E to 7.5°W). In Ireland, the Standard Time Act 1968 legally established that ''the time for general purposes in the State (to be known as standard time) shall be one hour in advance of Greenwich mean time throughout the year''. This act was amended by the Standard Time (Amendment) Act 1971, which legally established Greenwich Mean Time as a winter time period. Ireland therefore operates one hour behind standard time during the winter period, and reverts to standard time in the summer months. This is defined in contrast to the other states in the European Union, which operate one hour ahead of standard time during the summer period, but produces the same end result. ...
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M8 Motorway (Ireland)
The M8 motorway ( ga, Mótarbhealach M8) is an inter-urban motorway in Ireland, which forms part of the motorway from the capital Dublin to Cork city. The 149 km motorway commences in the townland of Aghaboe, County Laois and runs through the counties of Kilkenny, Tipperary and Limerick, terminating at the Dunkettle interchange in Cork City. First called for in the Road Needs Study (1998), it was later incorporated into the National Development Plan (2000–2006) and later still formed part of the Irish Government's Transport 21 plan for infrastructural development. The majority of the M8 (115 km) was built between 2006 and 2010. On 28 May 2010, the motorway was completed and had replaced almost all of the single-carriageway N8 except for a short section of urban road in Cork City. Route The route starts in the townland of Aghaboe, County Laois, at a motorway-to-motorway interchange with the M7. From here it proceeds southwards, passing under the R434 and R ...
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Cork (city)
Cork ( , from , meaning 'marsh') is the second largest city in Ireland and third largest city by population on the island of Ireland. It is located in the south-west of Ireland, in the province of Munster. Following an extension to the city's boundary in 2019, its population is over 222,000. The city centre is an island positioned between two channels of the River Lee which meet downstream at the eastern end of the city centre, where the quays and docks along the river lead outwards towards Lough Mahon and Cork Harbour, one of the largest natural harbours in the world. Originally a monastic settlement, Cork was expanded by Viking invaders around 915. Its charter was granted by Prince John in 1185. Cork city was once fully walled, and the remnants of the old medieval town centre can be found around South and North Main streets. The city's cognomen of "the rebel city" originates in its support for the Yorkist cause in the Wars of the Roses. Corkonians sometimes refer to ...
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M7 Motorway (Ireland)
The M7 motorway ( ga, Mótarbhealach M7) is a motorway in Ireland. The motorway runs continuously from the outskirts of Naas in County Kildare to Rossbrien on the outskirts of Limerick City. The M7 forms part of the Dublin to Limerick N7 national primary road. The section of the motorway bypassing Naas, an 8 km stretch, was the first section of motorway to open in Ireland, in 1983. Following substantial works to extend the M7 to Limerick, by the end of 2010, the motorway replaced all of the old single-carriageway N7 route which is now designated as R445. At 166.5 km, the M7 is the longest motorway in Ireland. Route Naas to Limerick The N7 leads directly into the M7 motorway at the Maudlin's Interchange near Naas (junction 9 on the N7-M7 corridor), and proceeds southwestwards, bypassing Naas, Newbridge, Kildare, Monasterevin, Ballybrittas, Portlaoise, Mountrath, Borris-in-Ossory, Roscrea, Moneygall, Toomevara, Nenagh and Annacotty. As of December 2010, the M7 is appr ...
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Dublin
Dublin (; , or ) is the capital and largest city of Republic of Ireland, Ireland. On a bay at the mouth of the River Liffey, it is in the Provinces of Ireland, province of Leinster, bordered on the south by the Dublin Mountains, a part of the Wicklow Mountains range. At the 2016 census of Ireland, 2016 census it had a population of 1,173,179, while the preliminary results of the 2022 census of Ireland, 2022 census recorded that County Dublin as a whole had a population of 1,450,701, and that the population of the Greater Dublin Area was over 2 million, or roughly 40% of the Republic of Ireland's total population. A settlement was established in the area by the Gaels during or before the 7th century, followed by the Vikings. As the Kings of Dublin, Kingdom of Dublin grew, it became Ireland's principal settlement by the 12th century Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland. The city expanded rapidly from the 17th century and was briefly the second largest in the British Empire and sixt ...
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Slieve Bloom Mountains
The Slieve Bloom Mountains ( ga, Sliabh Bladhma; la, Bladinae montes) is a mountain range in Ireland. They rise from the central plain of Ireland to a height of 527 metres. While not very high, they are extensive by local standards. The highest points are Arderin (527 m) () at the southwestern end of the range and Baunreaghcong (511 m) at the end of the Ridge of Capard. The Slieve Bloom Mountains stretch from near Roscrea in the south west to Rosenallis in the north west forming a link between County Laois and County Offaly. Access to the mountains and the most popular attractions is easiest by taking Exit 18 off the M7 for Mountmellick and following the R422 for Rosenallis, Clonaslee, Cadamstown, and Kinnitty. There are 3 routes which cross the mountain. From Clonaslee here it is very easy to follow the mountain road over 'the Cut' towards Mountrath. From Kinnitty take the road from the centre of the village opposite the Catholic Church past Longford Church to Glendine ...
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Plantations Of Ireland
Plantations in 16th- and 17th-century Ireland involved the confiscation of Irish-owned land by the English Crown and the colonisation of this land with settlers from Great Britain. The Crown saw the plantations as a means of controlling, anglicising and 'civilising' Gaelic Ireland. The main plantations took place from the 1550s to the 1620s, the biggest of which was the plantation of Ulster. The plantations led to the founding of many towns, massive demographic, cultural and economic changes, changes in land ownership and the landscape, and also to centuries of ethnic and sectarian conflict. They took place before and during the earliest English colonisation of the Americas, and a group known as the West Country Men were involved in both Irish and American colonization. There had been small-scale immigration from Britain since the 12th century, after the Anglo-Norman invasion. By the 15th century, direct English control had shrunk to an area called the Pale. In the 1540s t ...
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Medieval Period
In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period lasted approximately from the late 5th to the late 15th centuries, similar to the post-classical period of global history. It began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire and transitioned into the Renaissance and the Age of Discovery. The Middle Ages is the middle period of the three traditional divisions of Western history: classical antiquity, the medieval period, and the modern period. The medieval period is itself subdivided into the Early, High, and Late Middle Ages. Population decline, counterurbanisation, the collapse of centralized authority, invasions, and mass migrations of tribes, which had begun in late antiquity, continued into the Early Middle Ages. The large-scale movements of the Migration Period, including various Germanic peoples, formed new kingdoms in what remained of the Western Roman Empire. In the 7th century, North Africa and the Middle East—most recently part of the Eastern Roma ...
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Central Statistics Office (Ireland)
The Central Statistics Office (CSO; ga, An Phríomh-Oifig Staidrimh) is the statistical agency responsible for the gathering of "information relating to economic, social and general activities and conditions" in Ireland, in particular the National Census which is held every five years. The office is answerable to the Taoiseach and has its main offices in Cork.The Director General of the CSO is Pádraig Dalton. History The CSO was established on a statutory basis in 1994 to reduce the number of separate offices responsible for collecting statistics for the state. The CSO had existed, as an independent ad hoc office within the Department of the Taoiseach since June 1949, and its work greatly increased in the following decades particularly from 1973 with Ireland joining the European Community. Previous to the 1949 reforms, statistics were collected by the Statistics Branch of Department of Industry and Commerce on the creation of the Irish Free State in 1922. The Statistics Bra ...
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Province
A province is almost always an administrative division within a country or sovereign state, state. The term derives from the ancient Roman ''Roman province, provincia'', which was the major territorial and administrative unit of the Roman Empire, Roman Empire's territorial possessions outside Roman Italy, Italy. The term ''province'' has since been adopted by many countries. In some countries with no actual provinces, "the provinces" is a metaphorical term meaning "outside the capital city". While some provinces were produced artificially by Colonialism, colonial powers, others were formed around local groups with their own ethnic identities. Many have their own powers independent of central or Federation, federal authority, especially Provinces of Canada, in Canada and Pakistan. In other countries, like Provinces of China, China or Administrative divisions of France, France, provinces are the creation of central government, with very little autonomy. Etymology The English langu ...
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County Town
In the United Kingdom and Ireland, a county town is the most important town or city in a county. It is usually the location of administrative or judicial functions within a county and the place where the county's members of Parliament are elected. Following the establishment of the English county councils in 1889, the headquarters of the new councils were usually located in the county town of each county. However, the concept of a county town pre-dates the establishment of these councils. The concept of a county town is ill-defined and unofficial. Some counties have their administrative bodies located elsewhere. For example, Lancaster is the county town of Lancashire, but the county council is located in Preston. Some county towns are no longer situated within the administrative county because of changes in the county's boundaries. For example, Nottingham is administered by a unitary authority separate from the rest of Nottinghamshire. UK county towns, pre-19th-century refor ...
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