In March 2023, the Ordnance Survey was dissolved and its functions transferred to a new body called Tailte Éireann, which also incorporates the Property Registration Authority and the Valuation Office.

[3] OSI was an autonomous corporate body, with a remit to cover its costs of operation from its sales of data and derived products, which sometimes raised concerns about the mixing of public responsibilities with commercial imperatives.

[citation needed] It employed 235 staff in the Phoenix Park and in six regional offices in Cork, Ennis, Kilkenny, Longford, Sligo and Tuam.

A highly detailed survey of the whole of Ireland would be extremely useful for the British government, both as a key element in the process of levying local taxes based on land valuations and for military planning.

In 1824, a committee was established under the direction of Thomas Spring Rice, MP for Limerick, to oversee the foundation of an Irish Ordnance Survey.

Both the maps and surveying were executed to a high degree of engineering excellence available at the time using triangulation and with the help of tools developed for the project, most notably the strong "limelight".

[7] They were assisted by George Petrie, who headed the Survey's Topographical Department which employed the likes of John O'Donovan and Eugene O'Curry in scholarly research into placenames.

Despite the exclusion of Irish surveyors, this mapping scheme provided numerous opportunities for employment to Irish people, who worked as skilled or semi-skilled fieldwork labourers, and as clerks in the subsidiary Memoir project that was designed to illustrate and complement the maps by providing data on the social and productive worth of the country.