Despite the wishes of the Irish delegation, Justice Feetham kept the deliberations to a small area either side of the existing frontier, thereby precluding the wide-scale transfers of territory that the Free State had envisaged. The Commission's report states that it worked on the principle that it "must start its examination of the whole question on the basis of the division marked by the existing boundary, and must treat that boundary as holding good where no sufficient reason, based on considerations of which the Commission can properly take account, is shown for altering it" and that "no wholesale reconstruction of the map is contemplated... Northern Ireland must, when the boundaries have been determined, still be recognisable as the same provincial entity; the changes made must not be so drastic as to destroy its identity or make it impossible for it to continue as a separate province of the United Kingdom." With Feetham ruling out the use of plebiscites, the commission relied heavily on data concerning religious affiliation from the 1911 Census, supplemented by the hearings held in 1925.