What's the source of the numbers cited there? I'm asking because I had a quick look at the schools in my area, and I think a couple of the figures given are incorrect. (To be clear, they might just be out of date, and the big picture is probably accurate enough.)
Fair dues to whoever put the map together. I had been looking at schooldays.ie and at dept of education school reports, but it's a pain in the neck looking up each one compared to viewing this map.
I figured the map maker must have got the data from the dept of education, so I looked harder in there than I had before and it turns out it's easy to find this data in a spreadsheet form - the 2024/2025 academic year data published by the Dept of Ed at
https://www.gov.ie/en/department-of-education/collections/primary-schools-enrolment-figures. Looking at the numbers for the schools feeding our club, the map data matches the spreadsheet data. Plus the numbers seem about right for our schools, although I don't know the
exact numbers in our local schools. And the names of the schools seem to match exactly what's in that spreadsheet. So it sure looks like that's where it came from. Obviously one would expect that the numbers now, i.e. a year later, would be slightly different, and perhaps even a lot different in a tiny minority of cases.
Look at the heroic job Cill Na Martra do from their two schools - amazing (and no I'm not from there)! Anyway, in general you can see that there's a lot of clubs that simply have to amalgamate 'cos the boys are not there to form teams. In other cases, it sure looks like the boys exist to enable a club to field on its own, but there must be reasons why recruitment/retention is causing the numbers of players to be so low as to necessitate amalgamation. Of course, as many have pointed out, the issue is broader than amalgamations, i.e. the situation in the very large urban and suburban clubs is very worrying (not a surprise, but surely an enormous opportunity for massive improvement in some way).
Ah lads. Turn styles 
