You may have noticed that Ireland just got a lot smaller. The United Nations has formally endorsed the Equal Earth map that corrects the distortions of the one we’ve all used for centuries. Among these misrepresentations was the bigging-up of the Emerald Isle. Ireland is now being brought down to size.

For 500 years, the atlas represented the globe in two dimensions by using the Mercator projection. It shows the northern hemisphere much bigger than the southern, and the western continents far more prominent than the eastern. As a consequence, it imprinted on our brains an inflated notion of Ireland’s place in the world. It gave us notions.

On this old map, for example, Ireland looks about two-thirds the size of Madagascar. Ireland is 84,421sq km. Madagascar is 587,041sq km – seven times our size. Which, on the new map, is pretty much how it looks.

But this shift in perspective is not just a matter of relative scale. It’s about position. The Mercator map has us slap bang in the middle of the planet. On the Equal Earth map, Ireland looks a lot more northerly and a lot less central. Because it gives a truer picture of the size of the southern hemisphere, it pushes Ireland upwards, much closer to the fringes of the Arctic.

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