Unease at the emerging pressure on the public finances is becoming more widespread and the recent reports of the Fiscal Council have drawn attention to both the excessive reliance on corporation tax and the demographic trends which are pushing up Exchequer costs for healthcare and social transfers to the elderly.

Councillors and TDs of all parties have long focused on more parochial concerns as have senators, even though they do not represent geographical constituencies at all.

An hour spent scanning the websites of the provincial weeklies is depressing – endless reports on purely local issues and insistent demands that the central Exchequer should despatch additional funds, assumed to be limitless, to the district represented by the politician making the case.

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Rail timetables are a constant complaint – there ought to be earlier departures and more frequent services, invariably to Dublin, from each location, with no discussion of feasibility and no sympathy for the engineers at Irish Rail, who cannot whistle up additional capacity out of thin air, and no discussion of the operating losses which any such service improvements would incur.

Demands for physically impossible schedules on single-track lines are a staple, reported without context.

Apparently

Every region of the country, including Dublin and the main cities, is apparently the victim, according to local politicians, of discrimination in the allocation of attention from central government and its agencies.

It is notable that members of Seanad Éireann are routinely allotted a county identifier in both local and national media, reflecting their ambition to run for the Dáil locally next time round, even though there is no such thing as a senator representing a town or county.

National policy encourages this parochialism when it promotes ‘balanced regional development’, endorsing the view that each and every county is discriminated against and that all are entitled to a greater share in projected population growth.

A recent example is the campaign of Sligo for city status and ambitious plans for Athlone, both with current populations which are only a little over 20,000 and attracting enthusiasts for expansion to four or five times that figure.

The developer Seán Mulryan urges that Athlone, 125 kilometres from Dublin, should grow to 100,000, echoing an RTÉ programme called Futureville broadcast last year, fronted by two UCD professors and financed by Science Foundation Ireland.

Last week in The Irish Times, columnist Justine McCarthy added to the chorus in a piece headed ‘Dublin is bursting at the seams, but the solution is obvious’.

Her solution is Sligo, 207 kilometres from the capital.

Population growth

Far faster rates of population growth in recent decades have been seen in outer counties, notably Meath and Kildare, while within Dublin county, the fastest growth has been in the most distant parts of Fingal, a largely rural area a few decades ago.

This is urban sprawl at speed. She writes “any square centimetre of earth between Dublin’s edges and its ever-widening hinterland of commuter towns in neighbouring counties is being gobbled up for development”. Google it – this is simply not true according to the Central Statistics Office.

The Government meanwhile, is committed, at least for rhetorical purposes, to the reduction of long-distance commuting and aware that the lowest rates of household car ownership in Ireland are to be found, not surprisingly, in the inner suburbs of Dublin where residential development on the many vacant sites has become impossible.

There is a surface-level car park the size of a football pitch near Baggot Street bridge in Dublin 2 for which developers have been refused permission for a modest scheme of offices with some apartments, no more than five or six stories, after opposition from local residents and politicians.

In addition to the export of population, Dublin’s gifts to the rest of Leinster have included lengthy car commutes and public transport congestion, creating crowds of people with audible Dublin accents on rail platforms from first light every weekday morning in Portlaoise, Mullingar, Drogheda, Dundalk and as far away as Gorey and Kilkenny.

From these towns the internally displaced can journey through the wide open prairies in between, where the suburbs of the capital could readily have been accommodated.

The allocation, in the 1963 Planning and Development Act, of the gatekeeper role in land-use planning to the local councils was a false turning: the units of public administration least likely to make coherent decisions for fear of residents’ associations were handed veto powers, relentlessly exercised in Dublin, then increasingly everywhere else.

These powers can be further abused to inhibit projects in the water and electricity transmission sectors, contrary to the broader public interest.

The lesson is simple: you can end up, accidentally, with too much local democracy.