In the United Kingdom there has, until recently, been much investment in digital humanities focusing both on the creation of research resources and the provision of e-infrastructure. The development of Irish Studies e-resources have benefited from these initiatives through government Research Council investment from
ESRC, AHRC and JISC (organizations mirroring with work of NSF, NEH and
IMLS). However, funding to maintain and build on this work is increasingly fragile.

In contrast, in the Republic of Ireland digital humanities funding was largely absent until a 28,000,000 Euro investment through the Humanities Serving Irish Society (HSIS) and the related Digital Humanities Observatory (DHO) collaboration from 2007. Significant grants, involving almost all universities on the island of Ireland, offered a structured approach to the development of digital humanities.

This paper reviews the approaches in the UK and Ireland in the creation of e-resources, the opportunities for new scholarship through inter-linking scholarly corpora in a spatio-temporal context, and the long-promised step-change in humanities research outputs in a post grid-computing environment.