Speaking at a conference in Trinity College last week, Minister for Housing, Planning and Local Government Simon Coveney addressed some of the pressing issues of housing policy and homelessness.

Commenting on patterns of population growth in recent decades he observed, according to The Sunday Times, that ‘‘In the last 20 years in Ireland, the population has increased by almost a million and nearly all of those people have populated the broader Dublin region.’’

The minister’s impression that recent population growth has been concentrated around Dublin is widely shared, but it is entirely mistaken. Ireland’s population rose by 1.06 million in the 20 years up to the census taken in April 2011 but 608,000, most of the increase, occurred outside Dublin and its three adjoining counties and very little in the city proper. Table 1 lists the census figures by province:

Population growth in Leinster has indeed been faster than elsewhere but not by very much: there was rapid population growth all around the country, including in the west and the border counties. Within Leinster, the figures tell an interesting story. It is not in Dublin city, or even in Dublin county, that the fastest growth has occurred but rather in the counties neighbouring the capital and further out in the province of Leinster (Table 2).

The core city area saw only modest growth with the real explosion in Kildare and Meath. The story of Ireland’s recent population growth is a story of the marked suburbanisation of the Dublin area, whose outer commuter belt has expanded so dramatically, and unnecessarily, over the last several decades.

This drift to the suburbs is also evident in the provincial cities, where some of the central districts in both Cork and Limerick have seen actual population declines. Irish cities have become less compact and are surrounded by extensive, and unintended, green belts. Population has been forced to leapfrog this accidental cordon, where the suburbs ought to be, for more distant Leinster towns.

Minister Coveney lamented their rapid growth, mentioning Naas, Kilcock, Clane and Navan, noting that the latter could soon exceed the population of Waterford. He is right to be concerned about what has been happening – Navan is 50km from Dublin. There is substantial commuter traffic from as far away as Portlaoise, 80km from Dublin. It would be a bit of a squeeze but you could just about fit the city of Tokyo, with its population of 32 million, between Dublin and Portlaoise. The displaced Dubs commute through wide open prairie, in pursuit of housing that they can afford, housing that could readily be provided at more convenient distances.

Coveney went on to ask: ‘‘So, when we are planning for the next 20 years, are we seriously saying that we want to keep zoning land around the capital city?’’

There is enough room between Dublin and Navan to build a very sizeable city indeed, never mind an even bigger one between Dublin and Portlaoise. The reason for the excessive and environmentally unsound pattern of extreme sprawl is not, as Simon Coveney appears to believe, that we have been ‘‘zoning land around the capital city’’. The reason is that we have been zoning land around Naas, Kilcock, Clane and Navan, whose excessive growth rightly perturbs the minister. But there is ample land much closer to Dublin, which lacks zoning or necessary services or both. There are even working farms inside the M50.

The minister is keen to see future population growth in the provincial cities as well as in Dublin, and there is nothing wrong with that. But the planning system needs some central direction if Ireland is to have compact cities and affordable housing.