About Us

We are a father and son team with backgrounds in physics and mathematical modelling.  We share a passion for the application of maths and science to interpreting the world around us.  

The data sources that we have used to compile the index are freely available to the general public.  We are self funded and did not receive any income to set up the site, nor do we derive any income (advertising or otherwise) from this site.  We are residents of Counties Waterford and Limerick.

Background to the Index

Liveability indices are typically used to compare cities across the world, the Economist’s Global Liveability Index is a good example. The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the move to remote working, enabling people to avoid lengthy commutes to work.  This has spurred an interest in relocating away from large cities.  However, for those looking to move to a location outside of a global city there is a lack of useful comparative information to help make the decision to move. 

This Index addresses this issue by assessing the liveability of the whole of the Republic of Ireland on a county by county basis.  The counties are scored on parameters that influence people’s decision to relocate to a particular place.  These include property prices, climate, natural amenities and proximity to a city.

In order to assess counties for their natural amenities we developed a unique method of ranking the natural amenity of a particular area using the percentage of each area covered by water and mountains and attributed as urban.

The counties were then given an overall ranking based on an average of the scores for each of the four parameters.

The Future

We are looking to improve and expand the Liveability Index in a number of ways:

  1.  We would like to include the counties of Northern Ireland in our index but the Northern Ireland statistics office gives house price data by local government district rather than county.  Please contact us if you can help us with this.
  2. Counties are rather large areas and can be quite diverse, in the future we plan to break the counties down into smaller areas.
  3. In order to produce an overall liveability ranking we ascribe equal weighting to each parameter.  However, we understand that you would prefer to assign your own weighting to a parameter.  For example, property prices may be more important to you than climate.  We are developing an app that will allow you to do this.

We are open to other ideas on ways to improve the site, please feel free to contact us with suggestions.