Earlier today Noel Ballantyne tweeted me to day to let me know that Google had updated some of their imagery in Ireland, and he noticed something unusual in Portlaoise:

http://twitter.com/NoelBallantyne/status/27831123081

This imagery isn’t available in Google Maps yet, here’s what it looks like in Google Earth:

Strange how the prison is missing from the new image, and only older imagery is used.  Noel mentioned that the prison was undergoing some renovation work at the time the second image was taken, but while the site may have looked like a building site, there is no reason for it to have been removed from the image. Unless removal was specifically requested perhaps?

A later image of Mountjoy Jail in Dublin shows no such sign of censorship:

It seems to me that something strange is going on. Now where’s my tin hat?

UPDATE: Noel also noticed that the prison is missing from recently updated OSi mapping, but isn’t obscured in the 2005 Orthophotos:

http://maps.osi.ie/publicviewer/#V1,647780,698898,6