The preliminary results of this year's Census have been presented in an oversimplified way in the media. They have been content to emphasise the faster population growth of the Dublin region compared with the rest of the country, without looking behind these figures to examine the underlying pattern of population growth, writes Garret Fitzgerald.
Since 1996 the area within 25 miles of the centre of Dublin - what might be called the greater Dublin area - has experienced a population growth rate of 7.75 per cent - only fractionally above the 7 per cent growth rate for Ireland outside north Leinster.
Even more significant is that this greater Dublin growth rate is barely half the 13.5 per cent urban growth rate of our 49 largest towns other than Dublin and Cork, namely towns with over 10,000 people. In fact, the share of our urban population accounted for by greater Dublin and greater Cork has actually fallen fractionally since 1996 from 67.3 per cent to 66.1 per cent.
What seems to have been happening is that the process by which the population growth of Dublin in particular had been taking place within its outer suburbs is now being accompanied by an even more rapid growth of towns 30 to 50 miles away. This seems to reflect the impact of the much faster rise of house prices within the greater Dublin conurbation.
Among the towns in the outer Dublin hinterland where the population has risen rapidly since 1996 are Mullingar (47 per cent); Navan (41 per cent); Newbridge (28 per cent); Portlaoise (26 per cent); Wicklow (22 per cent); Drogheda (18 per cent); and Arklow (17 per cent). Similarly Midleton (22 per cent), Kinsale (17 per cent), Mallow and Cobh (both 13 per cent) within 15-20 miles of Cork have experienced high rates of population growth, in marked contrast to the population decline in the area within about eight miles of Cork.
(In each of these cases the population of the outskirts of the town has been included in these calculations, for almost all of them have burst their old boundaries and in many cases the recent population growth has been in their suburbs).
The displacement of the Dublin region's population growth to places 30 to 50 miles away from the city is a particularly disturbing phenomenon, which has both adverse economic and social implications. Commuter transport from such distant points - whether by car or by public transport - will impose increased economic costs on the community as a whole because of the need to provide additional roads and public transport. The full cost of such facilities is rarely recovered from commuters.
There are, moreover, unquantifiable but very serious human and social costs involved in long-distance commuting, for it greatly reduces the amount of time parents can spend with their children.
We can now see what a high price has had to be paid for the excessive protection our 1937 Constitution accorded to property rights - and that successive Governments have not felt able to mobilise support for a challenge to the scandal of billions of windfall profits accruing to a small number of farmers, developers and house-builders from the sale of land near the major cities for housing.
These windfall profits, enjoyed by a very small group of people who now have control of almost all building land around Dublin, have virtually doubled the prices of housing in the Dublin area.
Whilst most of the towns where the population has grown very rapidly in the past six years are long-distance commuter towns around Dublin and Cork, there has also been rapid population growth in some towns in the west and north-west - but not, interestingly, in the south. By far the fastest-growing non-commuter towns of substance - 12,000 population or over - have been Castlebar (25 per cent), Ennis (24 per cent), Letterkenny (18 per cent), and Galway (16 per cent).
This is a most striking development, for hitherto one of the problems about accelerating the economic growth of the west has been the weakness of its urban infrastructure - apart, of course, from Galway which throughout the past half-century has consistently been one of the fastest-growing urban centres in Ireland.
More puzzling, however, is the quite slow growth of towns in the southern part of the state, other than commuter towns in the hinterland of Cork. It is true that, exceptionally, the population of Enniscorthy rose by 16 per cent, and Limerick, Nenagh and Killarney all increased their population, but only by about 10 per cent, whilst towns such as Tipperary, Listowel, Dungarvan, Clonmel and Thurles have grown by only 1 per cent to 4 per cent.
No doubt those responsible for the spatial strategy study that was to have been published early this year will be taking advantage of the delay due to the election to build into their conclusions the new population data provided by the CSO's preliminary report on the Census.
Thirty-five years ago a Fianna Fáil government lacked the political courage to adopt the Buchanan Report, which proposed the development of a few large development centres to ensure rapid economic growth outside Dublin - a failure which last year the then environment minister, Noel Dempsey, criticised severely. The consequence of this, he pointed out, was the over-development of our capital city and unnecessary unemployment and emigration.
Future balanced regional development depends upon the willingness of those engaged on the spatial strategy study to refuse to compromise with the traditional half-baked political approach of spreading economic development so thinly - and so arbitrarily - around the country as to prevent the emergence of substantial centres of economic activity, the dynamism of which would then spread outwards to her hinterlands. If they do their job, then it will be up to the Government to back this strategy, to which it has been firmly committed by Noel Dempsey as minister.
It is encouraging that, even in the absence of a formal spatial strategy, growth centres seem to have started to develop of their own accord in the west. The spatial strategy team may well decide to build on and accelerate the growth of several of these centres, but the team will also have to select several growth centres from amongst the less dynamic towns in the rest of the country.
Limerick, (the population of which has risen by 10 per cent in the past six years), and the notably undynamic city of Waterford more or less nominate themselves.
But if such a strategy is to have any success, the total number of such initial growth centres must be sufficiently limited to enable each of them to attract a volume of new economic activity sufficient to promote and sustain rapid growth under the less favourable circumstances likely to prevail in the post-Celtic Tiger years ahead.
And, as experience has shown elsewhere, a crucial element in the process, especially in the smaller towns, will be giving priority to the development of transport facilities, amenities and facilities in these places that will attract executives and key workers to move there.