About

This site is written by an Irishman living in Asia, with family at home. Distance does something odd to a country. It sharpens some parts and blurs others. Mo Thír Féin is an attempt to hold on to the sharp parts.

What it covers

Not the events everybody already knows. Those are well served elsewhere. This archive follows the smaller histories that shaped what being Irish actually feels like, and it follows them properly rather than in passing.

Work runs on two tracks. The first is the thirty two counties, one page each, built up over time. The second is a set of strands, each a bounded subject followed from start to finish.

How it is built

Plain PHP and JSON files on shared hosting. No database, no build step, no framework. Every page can be edited in a file manager. That keeps the site cheap to run and easy to add to on any evening with a spare hour.

The map

The county map is drawn from official open data rather than traced by hand. Boundaries for the twenty six counties come from Tailte Éireann, formerly Ordnance Survey Ireland, and boundaries for the six northern counties come from OSNI. Those files describe legal county extents, which run out over tidal water, so the southern counties are cut to the Tailte Éireann 250k landmask to give a real coastline. Rivers and lakes come from the same sources. Every border is held once and shared between neighbours, so no gaps or overlaps exist anywhere on the island.

• Counties, landmask, rivers and lakes — Tailte Éireann, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0.
• Northern counties and lakes — OSNI, licensed under the Open Government Licence.