Where are the hurling and football strongholds in Ireland?

Analysis: Examining the number of county final wins for every club can show the strengths of hurling and football throughout the country

By Hannah Shen, Amelia Carroll and Gerard McCarthy, Maynooth University

Over the next two weekends, the All-Ireland hurling and football finals will take place at Croke Park in Dublin. As the attention of the nation focuses on the counties of Cork and Clare in the hurling and Galway and Armagh in the football, we're taking a step back and look at the wider geography of the GAA.

Strength in football or hurling is often associated with county success at the highest level such as Kerry and Dublin in football and Kilkenny, Cork (if you've a good memory), Tipperary and, more recently, Limerick in hurling.

But these narrow geographical brushes do not paint the full picture of the rich geography of the GAA in Ireland. Even within these counties, there are strongholds for each code: hurling is the game of choice in the corner of Kerry north of Tralee and there are football strongholds along south Tipperary stretching through Clonmel and Carrick on Suir.

We have looked at the number of senior county wins for every club in both football and hurling (the "roll of honour") to show the strengths of both GAA codes throughout the country. The club roll of honour is a staple of matchday programmes at county finals and provides us with a dataset of hurling and football throughout the country stretching as far back as the late 1880s.

The location of current clubs is available via the work of Ryan McGuinness at GAA Pitch Finder and we can cross reference these locations with the roll of honour. This of course does not apply to every winning club, however, as many clubs have become defunct, merged with