Dr. Brian Hughes:

This comparable excludes Dublin's burgeoning towns together with its modest rural population. If Ireland's provincial cities are to become the drivers of their regions and their wider rural areas, as is now encouragingly evident for Cork and Galway, considered spatial strategies will be required to promote their accelerated growth so that their average size difference with that of Dublin can be reduced. This is imperative because the default alternative is for a Dublin city state to emerge later in this century. Ireland therefore, needs to have that set of missing teeth restored, in contrast with the city-size hierarchies of comparable countries such as Finland, Denmark, Scotland and New Zealand.

The researched, strategic, demographic objective is at least to double the size of the provincial cities as quickly as possible but well within the 2040 timescale of this plan. That was the end objective of the Dublin Institute of Technology’s Twice the Size study of 2009 which had proposed a somewhat shorter timescale but without having had the foreknowledge of our subsequent, dreadful economic collapse.

I shall now turn to the town settlements and their demographic performance. There is a direct correlation between a city’s size and its sphere of influence, in terms of the growth outcomes of surrounding towns and their countryside, as shown in the statistics I have included in the submission supplied to the committee. It confirms some of the most significant town population losses since April 2011. Some of these dreadful population losses are topped by Birr with a 24.9% loss in the five years to April 2016. Other areas with losses in the 20% range include Clifden and Bantry. Within the same five year period Cootehill had a population loss of 12.7%, Ballina lost 8.3% of its population, Bundoran and Ballyshannon lost nearly 8% each, Templemore lost 6.4% and so on.

Not all towns or villages thrive, in the same way as there are laggard areas within cities. Nearness to a city, however, is a critical factor in influencing town growth rates. Generally, the nearby fastest–growing towns are those within the sphere of influence of a nearby city, as exemplified by the performance of Cork or Galway towns. Distance decay is an important land use transportation reality as the spatial counterpart to urban agglomeration. Within County Offaly, for example, its second town Birr was replaced by Edenderry in the census of 2002. Edenderry is twice as near to Dublin as Birr and is now 68.4% larger. In the five years to April 2016 Edenderry grew by 5.5% whereas Birr lost 24.9% of its population.

Further research work is required to provide individual explanations for some of the above horrendous population losses occurring within such a short time period. Many other towns not listed in this statistical table have either stopped growing over a number of censuses or have exhibit weak growth characteristics. Thurles, for example, is home to the founding of the GAA and location of the largest capacity stadium outside of Croke Park. In the 1981 census Thurles was placed within the top 20 of Ireland’s town size but in 2016 it was the placed at 56. I have a "what if" question in this regard. If the Buchanan plan been politically accepted and implemented in 1969, and if its 1986 target of 175,000 for Limerick, including Shannon, had been attained, what would have been the spillover benefit for Limerick’s regional sphere-of-influence towns, including Thurles? This would be on the basis that the self-generating benefits of urban agglomeration would have continued to 2016 with that city’s population now standing at 235,000, instead of 94,000, in direct proportion to the State population increase that has taken place during 1986 to 2016. The irony is that the State's population for 1986 was 1.16% above Buchanan’s projected 3.5 million.

It is clear that the former central-place functions of many Irish towns as market places and as service providers for the agricultural surrounds has radically altered, reflecting both fundamental changes in agriculture, the nature and change of what constitutes work and modes of living. Today, the Fordist style manufacturing single-branch plant era has almost finished and Nenagh is in the process of winding down its largest remaining plant. This is, however, a worldwide phenomenon epitomised by the most famous firm town, the city of Detroit. Yes; cities also fail.

Dr. Conor Skehan has kindly allowed me to present some of his own research work which helps clarify some of these changes and their effects on agriculture and on rural life.