My earliest research interests were in the general area of urban social geography. As an undergraduate I developed an interest in urban social areas and my undergraduate thesis used factor analysis to investigate the urban structure of Torbay in Devon (which I had gained an intimate knowledge of whilst working for three summers as a bus condustor). Unfortunately the Pringle seaside town model - proposed as an alternative to the better known Burgess (concentric ring), Hoyt (sector), and Harris and Ullman (multiple nucleii) models, none of which worked too well in Torbay - never really caught on.
On graduating, I was employed from 1971 to 1973 on the Belfast Social Malaise project (funded by the Northern Ireland Community Relations Commission), under the directorship of Dr. Fred Boal in the Department of Geography, Queen's University, Belfast. The basic objective was to identify areas of multiple social deprivation in the Belfast Urban Area, on the premise that social deprivation was an underlying cause of the spontaneous political violence which characterised the earlier phases of the 'troubles' in Northern Ireland. The term 'social malaise' was criticised because it could be interpreted as implying that deprived people were the cause of a sickness in society, whereas our understanding was that social deprivation was simply a symptom (rather than the cause) of a societal disease which needed to be tackled at a societal level, not at the level of individuals. The social malaise project was a major undertaking for one acadmic (Fred Boal) and two research assistants (Paul Doherty and myself) and, looking back on it, I am very proud of how much we actually achieved in only two years.
Whilst working on the social malaise project, I began to develop an awareness of the methodological limitations of the quantitative techniques used to identify areas of multiple deprivation. My doctoral thesis consequently explored the implications of the sometimes arbitrary decisions taken uncritically, or even unknowingly, by reseachers using sophisticated quantitive techniques in supposedly objective research. Although written within the specific context of identifying areas of multiple deprivation, the thesis had broader implications for many other areas of quantitative research then currently in vogue in geography, such as factorial ecology and ecological correlation.
By the time my thesis was completed, the quantitative geography of the late 1960s / early 1970s had been the subject of a more sustained critique from other sources, most notably the emergent school of Marxist geography. David Harvey's Social Justice And The City (1973), followed by his more mature reflections, such as his classic The Limits To Capital (1981), were undoubtedly the defining influences for a whole generation of socially concerned geographers, myself included. Whilst never too happy with the crude economism of some Marxists, nor the overly esoteric musings of others, my world view has always remained broadly Marxist, despite a continuing adherence to quantitative and computer techniques (including GIS).
By the early 1990s my research interests in urban and social geography had long since been superseded by my interests in medical geography and political geography, but I continued to teach the urban social geography courses in Maynooth until Brendan Bartley joined the Department in 1993. Brendan took over the urban courses, thereby freeing me to concentrate on the areas for which I believe I am better suited.
Although not active in either social or urban geography, I found myself drawn back into social deprivation related studies in the late 1990s. The early 1990s saw a proliferation of deprivation mapping exercises in Ireland, similar in many ways to the Belfast Social Malaise project except that they depended almost entirely on census data and were usually conducted at a national level. These studies used the exact same methodology that I had critiqued two decades previously in my doctorate thesis. They were also based upon the same premises that had been critiqued by the Marxist school of geography in the mid-1970s. It is amazing how academics insist on making the same mistakes, apparently oblivious to the fact that it has all been done before. I felt obliged to get involved again, albeit in a small way.
In 1996 I became involved in a joint project with colleagues in the University of Ulster, Coleraine to explore the methodologucal problems associated with identifying areas of multiple deprivation on an all-Ireland basis. This covered some of the issues raised in my doctorate research, but also raised some additional problems associated with comparing data from different jurisdictions, collected for different types of areal subdivision. It also highlighted some of the problems associated with making comparisons between settlements of different sizes. The Comparative Spatial Deprivation project was funded by the Combat Poverty Agency in the Republic and the Northern Ireland Voluntary Trust. The final reports were funded by the EU Programme for Peace and Reconciliation.
Around the same time, I helped organise a conference on Geography and Poverty in Maynooth as a joint venture between the Geographical Society in Ireland and the Combat Poverty Agency. Some papers discussed the results of projects designed to identify the areas of greatest need, whilst others discussed the processes which contributed to poverty in both urban and rural areas. The proceedings were published as Poor People, Poor Places by Oak Tree Press in 1999.