Selecting 12 strategically-located centres for development outside Dublin would bring most of the population within an hour's drive of a main centre of employment, according to Dr Patrick Commins, head of rural development research with Teagasc, the agriculture and food development authority.
Definite policies to improve the attractiveness of rural towns and villages for small-scale business enterprises are essential and these must be coupled with developments to make such centres attractive locations to live in, he said at a recent Teagasc conference.
The prospects for employment expansion and renewed population growth in rural areas depend considerably on the National Development Plan and especially on its capacity to achieve more balanced regional development, he warned.
Even at half the current rate of economic growth and a sustained expansion in employment, a repopulation of many rural areas can be expected going towards 2015, based on relevant experiences in other countries.
"In most developed countries, the historical trends of rural-to-urban migration and the consequent depopulation of rural areas have largely been replaced by `counter-urbanisation' and rural repopulation tendencies," he said.
Dr Commins did not propose setting up new towns or cities, but a reasoned development of 12 key urban areas and their hinterland (see map).
"The identification of the major gateways presents no problem: Dublin, Cork, Limerick/Shannon, Galway and Waterford are self-evidently the first tier of regional gateways. "A second tier of larger urban centres is envisaged as regional gateways, with a limited number to ensure the necessary concentration of resources and investment. "Below the secondary tier, there will be a need for a range of `hub-towns', primarily as nodes of development at county level," he said.
Over the past decade the rate of growth of employment in foreign-owned manufacturing enterprises was twice that of Irish-owned enterprises, he explained. But employment in foreign-owned enterprises favoured regions with at least one major urban centre, such as Dublin and the Mid-East, Galway in the West and Cork in the SouthWest.
There was an increasing proportion of services employment where ready access to customers and skilled employees was vital, so new employment tended to gravitate towards the larger centres of employment. "Thus, the problem for the future is not merely redressing the undue concentration in the east of the country but in achieving a measure of employment dispersal within regions," said Dr Commins.
"Analyses of the longer-term trends of employment in grant-aided enterprises show a clear trend in most regions in favour of centres of 5,000 population upwards."
As agricultural employment declines - from 8 per cent at present to around 4 per cent by 2015 - there are optimistic prospects for the expansion of off-farm employment in rural areas.
