Ordnance Survey Ireland (OSI; ga, Suirbhéireacht Ordanáis Éireann) is the national mapping agency of

Ireland Ireland ( ; ga, Éire ; Ulster Scots dialect, Ulster-Scots: ) is an island in the Atlantic Ocean, North Atlantic Ocean, in Northwestern Europe, north-western Europe. It is separated from Great Britain to its east by the North Channel (Grea ...

. It was established on 4 March 2002 as a body corporate. It is the successor to the former Ordnance Survey of Ireland. It and the

Ordnance Survey of Northern Ireland {{Unreferenced, date=April 2021 Ordnance Survey of Northern Ireland (OSNI) was the official mapping agency of Northern Ireland. The agency ceased to exist separately on 1 April 2008 when it became part of Land and Property Services, an executiv ...

(OSNI) are the ultimate successors to the Irish operations of the British

Ordnance Survey Ordnance Survey (OS) is the national mapping agency for Great Britain. The agency's name indicates its original military purpose (see ordnance and surveying), which was to map Scotland in the wake of the Jacobite rising of 1745. There was a ...

. OSI is part of the Irish public service. OSI has made modern and historic maps of the state free to view on its website. OSI is headquartered at Mountjoy House in the

Phoenix Park The Phoenix Park ( ga, Páirc an Fhionnuisce) is a large urban park in Dublin, Ireland, lying west of the city centre, north of the River Liffey. Its perimeter wall encloses of recreational space. It includes large areas of grassland and tre ...

Dublin Dublin (; , or ) is the capital and largest city of Ireland. On a bay at the mouth of the River Liffey, it is in the province of Leinster, bordered on the south by the Dublin Mountains, a part of the Wicklow Mountains range. At the 2016 c ...

. Mountjoy House was also the headquarters, until 1922, of the Irish section of the British

Organisation

Under the Ordnance Survey Ireland Act 2001, the Ordnance Survey of Ireland was dissolved and a new corporate body called Ordnance Survey Ireland was established in its place. OSI is now an autonomous corporate body, with a remit to cover its costs of operation from its sales of data and derived products, which has sometimes raised concerns about the mixing of public responsibilities with commercial imperatives. It employs 235 staff in the Phoenix Park and in six regional offices in Cork, Ennis, Kilkenny, Longford, Sligo and

Tuam Tuam ( ; ga, Tuaim , meaning 'mound' or 'burial-place') is a town in Ireland and the second-largest settlement in County Galway. It is west of the midlands of Ireland, about north of Galway city. Humans have lived in the area since the Bronz ...

.A Brief History
Ordnance Survey Ireland. OSI had sales of €13.3 million in 2012.

Products

The most prominent consumer publications of OSI are the ''Dublin City and District Street Guide'', an atlas of Dublin city, and the ''Complete Road Atlas of Ireland'' which it publishes in co-operation with Land and Property Services Northern Ireland (formerly the Ordnance Survey of Northern Ireland). The board also publishes (jointly with OSNI) a series of 1:50000 maps of the entire island known as the ''Discovery Series'' and a series of 1:25000 maps of places of interest (such as the

Aran Islands The Aran Islands ( ; gle, Oileáin Árann, ) or The Arans (''na hÁrainneacha'' ) are a group of three islands at the mouth of Galway Bay, off the west coast of Ireland, with a total area around . They constitute the historic barony of Aran i ...

and

Killarney Killarney ( ; ga, Cill Airne , meaning 'church of sloes') is a town in County Kerry, southwestern Ireland. The town is on the northeastern shore of Lough Leane, part of Killarney National Park, and is home to St Mary's Cathedral, Ross Cast ...

national park) and the Geology of Ireland.

History

Thomas Colby, the long-serving Director-General of the

in Great Britain, was the first to suggest that the Ordnance Survey be used to map Ireland. A highly detailed survey of the whole of Ireland would be extremely useful for the British government, both as a key element in the process of levying local taxes based on land valuations and for military planning. In 1824, a committee was established under the direction of Thomas Spring Rice, MP for

Limerick Limerick ( ; ga, Luimneach ) is a western city in Ireland situated within County Limerick. It is in the province of Munster and is located in the Mid-West which comprises part of the Southern Region. With a population of 94,192 at the 2016 ...

, to oversee the foundation of an Irish Ordnance Survey.Rachel Hewitt, 'Ensign of Empire', ''Map Of A Nation: A Biography Of The Ordnance Survey'' (Granta Books, 7 Jul 2011) Spring Rice believed in the importance of Irish involvement in the mapping process but was overruled by the

Duke of Wellington Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, (1 May 1769 – 14 September 1852) was an Anglo-Irish people, Anglo-Irish soldier and Tories (British political party), Tory statesman who was one of the leading military and political figures of Uni ...

, who did not believe Irish surveyors were qualified for the task. Instead, the Irish Ordnance Survey was initially staffed entirely by members of the

British Army The British Army is the principal land warfare force of the United Kingdom, a part of the British Armed Forces along with the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force. , the British Army comprises 79,380 regular full-time personnel, 4,090 Gurk ...

. From 1825–46, teams of surveyors led by officers of the Royal Engineers, and men from the ranks of the Royal Sappers and Miners, traversed Ireland, creating a unique record of a landscape undergoing rapid transformation. The resulting maps (primarily at 6″ scale, with greater detail for urban areas, to an extreme extent in Dublin) portrayed the country in a degree of detail never attempted before, and when the survey of the whole country was completed in 1846, it was a world first. Both the maps and surveying were executed to a high degree of engineering excellence available at the time using triangulation and with the help of tools developed for the project, most notably the strong "limelight". The concrete triangulation posts built on the summits of many Irish mountains can still be seen to this day. The Royal Engineer officers in charge of the operation were Thomas Colby and

Lieutenant A lieutenant ( , ; abbreviated Lt., Lt, LT, Lieut and similar) is a commissioned officer rank in the armed forces of many nations. The meaning of lieutenant differs in different militaries (see comparative military ranks), but it is often ...

Thomas Larcom. They were assisted by George Petrie, who headed the Survey's Topographical Department which employed the likes of John O'Donovan and Eugene O'Curry in scholarly research into placenames. Captain J.E. Portlock compiled extensive information on agricultural produce and natural history, particularly geology. Despite the exclusion of Irish surveyors, this mapping scheme provided numerous opportunities for employment to Irish people, who worked as skilled or semi-skilled fieldwork labourers, and as clerks in the subsidiary Memoir project that was designed to illustrate and complement the maps by providing data on the social and productive worth of the country. The total cost of the Irish Survey was £860,000 (adjusted for inflation, equivalent to approximately £100,000,000 in 2018). The original survey was later revisited and revised maps were issued on a number of occasions. All of these historical maps (at least up to 1922) are in the

public domain The public domain (PD) consists of all the creative work to which no exclusive intellectual property rights apply. Those rights may have expired, been forfeited, expressly waived, or may be inapplicable. Because those rights have expired, ...

and while the originals can be hard to find, they can be freely reproduced.

From 1922

The British

ceased to map Ireland just before the creation of the

Irish Free State The Irish Free State ( ga, Saorstát Éireann, , ; 6 December 192229 December 1937) was a state established in December 1922 under the Anglo-Irish Treaty of December 1921. The treaty ended the three-year Irish War of Independence between ...

in 1922 (the

Partition of Ireland The partition of Ireland ( ga, críochdheighilt na hÉireann) was the process by which the Government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland divided Ireland into two self-governing polities: Northern Ireland and Southern Ireland. ...

having already taken place in May 1921 upon the creation of

Northern Ireland Northern Ireland ( ga, Tuaisceart Éireann ; sco, label= Ulster-Scots, Norlin Airlann) is a part of the United Kingdom, situated in the north-east of the island of Ireland, that is variously described as a country, province or region. Nort ...

). The new

(OSNI) officially came into existence on 1 January 1922, while the new Ordnance Survey of Ireland (OSI) came into being slightly later, on 1 April 1922. The OSI was initially part of the

Irish Army The Irish Army, known simply as the Army ( ga, an tArm), is the land component of the Defence Forces of Ireland.The Defence Forces are made up of the Permanent Defence Forces – the standing branches – and the Reserve Defence Forces. The A ...

under the Department of Defence. All staff employed were military personnel until the 1970s, when the first civilian employees were recruited. In more recent times, the Ordnance Survey of Ireland replaced traditional ground surveying with mapping based primarily on aerial photography. It has also worked with the postal service, An Post, to gather and structure geographic data.

Cultural depiction

The national survey carried out between 1825 and 1846 is the focus of the 1981 play ''

Translations Translation is the communication of the meaning of a source-language text by means of an equivalent target-language text. The English language draws a terminological distinction (which does not exist in every language) between ''transl ...

'' by

Brian Friel Brian Patrick Friel (c. 9 January 1929 – 2 October 2015) was an Irish dramatist, short story writer and founder of the Field Day Theatre Company. He had been considered one of the greatest living English-language dramatists. (subscription req ...

. The main theme is the inscription of

Irish language Irish ( Standard Irish: ), also known as Gaelic, is a Goidelic language of the Insular Celtic branch of the Celtic language family, which is a part of the Indo-European language family. Irish is indigenous to the island of Ireland and was ...

place names in an anglicised form, using a phonetic rendering for British

anglophone Speakers of English are also known as Anglophones, and the countries where English is natively spoken by the majority of the population are termed the ''Anglosphere''. Over two billion people speak English , making English the largest language ...

ears of an approximate

Irish Irish may refer to: Common meanings * Someone or something of, from, or related to: ** Ireland, an island situated off the north-western coast of continental Europe ***Éire, Irish language name for the isle ** Northern Ireland, a constituent unit ...

pronunciation.

References

;Notes *Andrews, J.H., ''A Paper landscape: the Ordnance Survey in nineteenth-century Ireland'' (Oxford, 1975). *McWilliams, P.S., "The Ordnance Survey Memoir of Ireland: Origins, Progress and Decline" (PhD thesis, Queen's University Belfast, 2004). *''Report on Ordnance Memoir'' (1843), HC 1844 (527) xxx, 259–385. *''An Illustrated Record of the Ordnance Survey in Ireland'' (The O.S.I., Dublin, and the O.S.N.I., Belfast, 1991).

External links

Official website of OSi

Official website of OSNI

Interactive Ordnance Survey Maps

Alternative Source of Land Registry Compliant Maps

(unusable) try http://map.geohive.ie/

An eye on the Survey
at

History Ireland ''History Ireland'' is a magazine with a focus on the history of Ireland. The first issue of the magazine appeared in Spring 1993. It went full-colour in 2004 and since 2005 it is published bi-monthly. It features articles by a range of writers ...

19th Century Ordnance Survey of Ireland
at Translations
Ordnance Survey Ireland (OSi) 19th Century Historical Maps: collection of mainly 19th-century maps of almost 150 cities, towns, and villages in the Republic of Ireland.
A UCD Digital Library Collection.
Geological Survey Maps Collection. Over 200 maps of Ireland 1859-1913.
A UCD Digital Library Collection.
Historic Maps Collection. 18th and 19th-century historic maps of Ireland.
A UCD Digital Library Collection.
Maps of Dublin accompanying Thom's Official Directory, printed by the Ordnance Survey for the Dublin publisher Alexander Thom from the six-inch map sheets 18 and 22, and dating from the late 19th century.
A UCD Digital Library Collection. {{authority control Government agencies of the Republic of Ireland National mapping agencies Irish toponymy Phoenix Park Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage