It has become a constant refrain in Ireland over recent years that provincial areas are losing out to the cities, and especially to Dublin. Hard evidence does not feature in these complaints and there are regular assertions that are simply not true. For example, the overall population of rural Ireland is rising while local politicians warn of rural depopulation as if it was widespread.

There are indeed rural areas where population has fallen but there are many more where numbers are on the increase. One of the complaints, and a reasonable one, is that retail outlets in the smaller towns are struggling. But they are struggling too in the cities, as a stroll along any of the secondary shopping streets in Dublin or Cork will confirm.

There are just as many boarded-up premises as in the smaller towns and just as many hopeful “to let” signs.

This is not just an Irish phenomenon and it is not just about shoppers migrating to the internet or to online banking. It has been happening for decades and the principal driver is personal mobility.

Car ownership is higher in rural Ireland than it is in the cities. For example, in Dublin city and county the rate is 394 per 1,000 people, while in Tipperary it is 478, even though average income in Tipperary is lower. Annual figures are available for the usage of cars by county and they show that rural dwellers do higher mileage.

In Dublin city and county, the average is about 13,000km per car per year, compared with about 18,000km in Tipperary. Combined with the lower ownership rate in Dublin, this means that annual car travel per person in Dublin is only 60% of the Tipperary figure.

Urban dwellers have better public transport access and they use it.

The corollary is that rural populations (Tipperary is reasonably typical) have greater access to personal private transport and they use it intensively, for work journeys but also for shopping. This means that retailers in the smaller towns and villages are competing with bigger towns within easy driving range and they have lost out steadily over the years.

Supermarkets

The same thing has happened in the cities, where big supermarkets and out-of-town shopping centres with big parking lots have won out.

A recent report from one of the London security firms revealed that over 2,000 high-street shops have closed in Britain this year alone, with 50,000 job losses, most of them in larger towns. Some famous names have gone under or cut back severely, including Toys R Us, Mothercare, Carpetright, House of Fraser, Debenhams and once-mighty Marks and Spencer.

Even though UK economic performance has been sluggish, the total volume of consumer spending is still rising. These store closures are due to longer-term shifts in the structure of retailing and are not just a recent phenomenon. No more than in Ireland, they are not confined to small towns and villages.

Bank branches

The number of bank branches in Britain is now half what it was in the 1970s and there has been a similar decline in Ireland, with entire branch networks disappearing. The financial crash was the trigger but both countries were over-banked and rationalisation was under way before the bank insolvencies. The common factor in both countries has been the spread of personal mobility and the consequent reduction in the need for large numbers of retail outlets.

The advent of online shopping and internet banking has merely accelerated a trend that was well established 30 years ago, namely the consolidation of retailing into larger units and the decline of traditional high-street shopping in cities as well as small towns. Blame the car, not the Government.

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