Does it not beggar belief that, of the 10,300 public servants due to be transferred out of Dublin under the Government's decentralisation programme, only 430 are stated to go to other cities? That's less than 5 per cent, a real measure of how the regional capitals are valued by the politicians in power.
Yet cities are the centres of civilisation and progress. Cork, Limerick, Galway and Waterford - and Sligo, too, for that matter - deserve better. As our series on Regional Capitals showed, all of them have ambitious development plans, but none individually has the "critical mass" to bring these plans to fruition without Government support.
Certainly, the development of a highly-successful International Financial Services Centre in Dublin's Docklands would never have got off the ground if it did not have the whole-hearted backing of successive governments. Yet the IFSC has also served to reinforce the overwhelming dominance of Dublin, as will the motorway network being planned with the M50 as its hub. Dr Edward Walsh, former president of the University of Limerick, has complained that the National Roads Authority is restrained by a 1999 Government decision, favouring a Dublin-centred motorway network, from building good roads linking Galway, Limerick, Cork and Waterford. Much better rail links are also needed, but here again their viability is crucially contingent on the regional capitals achieving "critical mass".
It is abundantly clear that the National Spatial Strategy was misguided in designating eight "gateways" and nine "hubs" outside Dublin, and that this diffusion of focus was compounded by the decentralisation programme, under which public servants would be dispersed to 53 locations in 25 counties. Not only is this completely daft in terms of efficient public administration, it also serves to undermine the regional capitals and their efforts to develop and prosper. Is there any reason, for example, that Cork shouldn't be double the size that it is? Or Limerick, for that matter? And it is not just a question of population, but of boundaries too; Limerick and Waterford, in particular, are needlessly constrained by city limits that were fixed more than half-a-century ago.
The Taoiseach must heed Dr Walsh's call for the establishment of a commission to examine the compelling case for a "multi-city cluster of international significance" involving Cork, Limerick and Galway as an effective counterpole to Dublin. The capital is congested. It is already too large for its own, or Ireland's, good. In the 1920s, Dublin accounted for 25 per cent of the State's population, but now it is 40 per cent. This is a direct result of the failure of successive governments to pursue balanced regional development, along the lines proposed by Colin Buchanan in the late 1960s. If Dublin continues to grow in the absence of viable alternative centres, the Republic will become a city-state, with Dublin as the only show in town. And that would not be in the national interest, from any perspective.