It is not surprising that strong pressure should have existed for decades in favour of decentralising economic activity to areas outside Dublin.
The answer to how successful these efforts have been is that, until 1995, employment in the Dublin region (Dublin, Kildare, Meath and Wicklow) consistently rose faster than elsewhere. In the 1970s three-quarters of the jobs increase was in the Dublin region.
It is true that during the early 1980s the corrective fiscal action that had to be taken led to a similar drop of 4 per cent in jobs in Dublin and elsewhere. But after that crisis, from the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s, job growth was twice as rapid in the Dublin region as elsewhere, so well over half of all job growth was in the Dublin area.
However, the Labour Force Survey suggests that from 1995 to 1997 the growth in employment was similar in all areas. While these data from a sample survey are subject to a margin of error, it looks as if four years ago there may have been a shift from the Dublin-biased pattern of a quarter of a century.
Because the unemployment level in Dublin was higher in 1987 than elsewhere, there may have been some case for accepting a higher job growth rate in Dublin during the following years. But the annual Labour Force Survey suggests that early in the recent boom, in 1994, the jobless rate in the Dublin area had assimilated to that of the rest of the country.
The faster job growth rise in Dublin, until recently at least, is not due to inadequate decentralisation of public service employment, or to a failure to spread new jobs equitably around the country. Government policies in both these areas have been very successful.
The policy of administrative decentralisation has been a considerable success. Although public service numbers in Dublin increased by as much as a third during the 1970s, since 1981 the size of the public service in Dublin has remained static.
By contrast, an increase of over two-thirds in the number of local authority staff, together with large-scale decentralisation of many government departments, has doubled or more than doubled the number of public servants in four of the five Connacht counties as well as in Cavan, Laois, Offaly and in North Tipperary. And in almost all the other counties the number of public servants has increased by 40 to 90 per cent.
In general this policy has made good sense, reducing the pressure on the Dublin road system and on housing in or near the capital, and enabling many civil servants to move back to the places from which they had earlier migrated to Dublin. With modern communications, routine administrative tasks can be carried out anywhere without inconvenience to the public. Nevertheless, where the public requires ready access to the Civil Service or to information or data at national level, these functions obviously cannot be decentralised. And the same is obviously true of the whole area of policy formation and execution, where all those involved need to be near each other and the seat of government and parliament. Given these essentials, there may not be much room for further administrative decentralisation.
There is also strong support for decentralisation in the manufacturing sector. And in this sector there has been a huge shift away from the Dublin region.
In part this reflects the fact that 25 years ago, before the move towards free trade had begun to revolutionise Irish industry, Dublin had more than its share of protected and technologically backward industries such as clothing and car assembly (both with over two-thirds of their jobs in Dublin), as well as alcoholic beverages (three-fifths in Dublin). And it also had a grossly over-manned seaport.
Moreover, while areas outside Dublin have since benefited from the growth in jobs in the meat and dairy sectors, the decline in employment in other parts of the food industry, where the Dublin region accounted for almost three-fifths of its jobs, has hit the capital and its environs severely. Over a quarter of food industry jobs in Dublin have disappeared in the past quarter of a century.
At the same time the great bulk of new industrial investment has been located outside Dublin. In chemicals and pharmaceuticals, for example, the numbers employed outside Dublin have trebled, whereas in Dublin employment is little higher than in 1971. Jobs in metals and engineering outside Dublin have also increased by a factor of 3.5, twice as rapidly as in and around the capital.
THE net effect of this combination of factors has been that since 1971 the Dublin region has lost a net 15,000 manufacturing jobs while elsewhere manufacturing employment had risen by a net 50,000 by 1996, that is on average by half. In some parts, for example the province of Connacht and Longford/Westmeath, manufacturing jobs increased over two-and-a-quarter times between 1971 and 1996.
But if both the decentralisation and industrial promotion policies have so markedly favoured areas outside Dublin, how is it that the overall growth of employment in Dublin has nevertheless been twice as rapid as in the rest of the State?
The explanation of this phenomenon lies principally in the fact that the Dublin region has naturally been little affected by the secular decline in agricultural employment: farm employment in this region dropped by less than 10,000 between 1971 and 1996. By contrast, in the rest of the State the decline in this sector was almost 130,000.
This has obscured the remarkable fact that in the past 25 years non-agricultural employment in the rest of Ireland rose by half as much again as in the Dublin region, viz by 60 per cent as against less than 40 per cent. However, even this differential in favour of employment growth outside Dublin could not fully compensate for the impact of the halving of farm employment during this period.
An important supplementary factor in the faster growth of total employment in the Dublin region has been the quite extraordinary growth of services to business, employment in which has more than quadrupled since 1971, rising by 100,000. And two-thirds of employment in this sector is in the Dublin region.
It will be seen, therefore, that the task of diverting future employment growth from the Dublin region to the rest of the country is likely to prove more difficult than many imagine. Administrative decentralisation has already been carried quite far, and there may not be much room for further progress in this direction without damaging the effective functioning of central government.
And while there may be room for putting some more pressure on new industries to locate outside the Dublin area, for example, by further limiting non-tax incentives to firms locating elsewhere, it will not be easy to improve upon the remarkable success already achieved in industrial decentralisation.
And this success has been remarkable, for in the dynamic high-tech sector - chemicals and pharmaceuticals, electrical equipment, computers and health-care equipment - employment outside Dublin rose between 1971 and 1996 by 50,000 or fivefold, whereas in Dublin the increase was only 14,000.
These are the realities that have to be faced in seeking at this stage to accelerate further the decentralisation process so as to take some of the pressure off the overheated Dublin region.