It isn't. Drogheda, Dundalk, Swords, Navan, Bray, Ennis and Carlow are all towns that are larger than it by official statistics. I assume OP has left them out of his post because none of them have "city status"
When did Kilkenny lose city status? Did anyone tell Kilkenny?
Edit: From 1840 onwards, Kilkenny has not been administered as a city under local government law, but the Local Government Reform Act 2014 provides for "the continued use of the description city". Well, well, well.
Yes, Kilkenny was told. They kicked up a huge fuss and a line was added to the local government reform act that says they can describe themselves as a city, while not being one. The 5 cities are then listed in that very act
Also worth pointing out we're not subject to British law for quite a long time now...
The Dutch do it best I believe. Dense but not very high rise and still at a very human scale with clever use of space and still most people live in houses. Even the Brits do it much better. Compared to us they manage to have many large cities and towns yet the countryside and village structure is very well maintained.
One benefit of having compact houses too (rowhouses and semi-detached) is that they can actually often be the cheapest to service (hence why the semi-d model arose in Ireland) at least in temperate climates without district heating. Only street level 3 to 4 story apartments (particularly made of wood and light foundations) are a bit cheaper particularly if they are own-door or walk-in and if they lack elevators. Although those kinds of apartments are illegal to build nowadays so they have to be ruled out. Particularly as apartments scale, both building costs and even servicing costs can have a diseconomies of scale effect. This is especially true for brownfield apartment construction (less true for greenfield). Yes, the increased density can have benefits but mostly only when land costs are extremely high. They often aren’t easier to service overall, usually it balances out. Having “own-door” style housing genuinely cuts infrastructure and servicing costs significantly in many respects that can outweigh the lower density sometimes.
And rowhouses and compact semi-detached houses especially when comparing family sized dwellings (not 1 or 2 bed apartments but 3+ bed) are only barely less dense (maybe by 1.5 to 2.5 times) than many family sized apartment blocks due to the comparative lack of common greenfield spacing that apartments have (in favour of gardens) though that depends on the design. The biggest issue with Irish estates is not even their density so much but their lack of permeability in terms of footpaths and cycle paths. That’s exactly what the Dutch do differently: their estates are not isolated “gated” communities and actually have walking and biking permeability that cuts travel times significantly even with similar housing density.
Yes lack of permeability in Ireland is so bad. I live in Galway where they are still putting in new disconnected estates. There is a better balance of what look like ok(ish) apartments to houses though. It’s important to keep a good mix of housing types especially with a view to an ageing population.
No way is the traffic situation in Galway justified. Planning and traffic engineering is at fault. Galway should not be allowed to install another traffic light without actually considering the flow of traffic from light to light or make multiple lane roadways that funnel into a one lane road.
Galway clearly needs a ring road. It will allow traffic to flow west to east without having to go through the city centre. Roads are also needed for buses and trucks. Every other urban centre in Ireland has a ring road except Galway.
I consider myself quite Green leaning. But on a practical level you need ring roads around any city. Precisely for the reason to move traffic away from the urban centres.
But the places people want to go are in the city centre like UHG, UG, schools, shops and entertainment. The ring road will help a little for the smaller portion of traffic wanting to exit or by pass the city. It is probably justified in the context of an expanding city but it will not relieve congestion in the core that much only facilitate more sprawl. Without serious investment in quality dedicated public transport routes and much better active travel and permeability measures the new ring road will ease traffic at best for a period of 5 years or so. Bus connects as planned is not nearly enough and much more effort needs to be put into frequent transport from the county to the city. Galway’s elongated footprint and extended dispersed ribbon population on radial routes is a real problem and costly to fix.
Induced demand can apply but it is far from a hard rule. This concept is much more relevant in America where some cities do foolishly push for endless lane expansions from 8 lanes to 10 lanes wide highways or even up to 14 lanes or more! In which cases, yes, that is really dumb and absolutely induces traffic demand. Especially when these wide roads very rarely trigger widening the roads at the very exits of the highway, making the road widening even more pointless. Building a ring road, especially if development alongside it is managed and controlled, does not “induce demand” in the same way. Just like how if the M50 wasn’t built in Dublin, traffic would be far, far worse. And likewise, expanding motorways or arterial roads from 4 lanes to 6 lanes can be justifiable for many other reasons other than just lane capacity (particularly to prevent bottlenecking where truck traffic overtakes each other, which can be very problematic in very busy 4 lane motorways and single handedly cause traffic jams).
You also have to consider the logistics benefits. Logistics and the resulting consumer cost decreases and industrial and job expansion are if anything, the primary benefit to our motorway buildout, not necessarily improving driving timeframes or car infrastructure (which is a secondary benefit). The American interstate highway system and the German autobahn after all were built precisely for military and logistics reasons, the car infrastructure benefit was just a massive secondary benefit.
That's not practically affordable in the here and now. We have 2 trams in the whole country currently. Eventually it would be great to have trams running in every major urban area.
Having a ring road is nothing to do with induced demand. It's about moving traffic out of city centres. Our main urban areas are being progressively pedestrianised as part of this.
Metrolink and more trams are not acceptable. From initiation the Metrolink will be under capacity. Building should be heavy rail with higher passenger capacity rather than slow trams with low volume cars.
Never did I suggest for a tram to slowly gallavant down a grassy medium at 10kph. You suggested it.
Building roads in urban areas always created Induced Demand. You can’t just wave your hands and wish it away. Accept it exists and plan for it accordingly.
The new road will absolutely create additional demand. The council have plans to rezone large tracts of land near it. When they are built, the residents will have no choice but to drive, further inducing demand.
I’m also confused about how a billion euro ring road is affordable but some commuter and light rail is obviously unaffordable. Some mental gymnastics going on there.
How much of that demand is due to the fact that Ireland has an enormous backlog in infrastructure capacity and built literally nothing post 2008 and grew in population at the fastest rate in all of Europe over the last 20 years (and particularly the last 5 years which have been absolutely enormous in growth)? A massively growing population like we have now always induces much more infrastructure strain and much more housing capacity than a slower growing population (like in Germany, France, Denmark, etc). You cannot handwave away that element of the equation and claim it is “induced demand” and not “capacity deficit” instead.
Building roads in urban areas always created Induced Demand. You can’t just wave your hands and wish it away. Accept it exists and plan for it accordingly.
The point is to build it outside of the urban core of the city. It's not about increasing or decreasing road usage, it's about moving where the road usage happens. The point is that you are moving traffic away from the city centre, pedestrianising as much as possible and banning cars from there where possible. That's nothing to do with induced demand, it's to do with where the demand is. The goal is to have a car free city core as much as possible.
This isn't induced demand. It is shifting the demand on the roads in the town centre to outside of the town centre.
I’m also confused about how a billion euro ring road is affordable but some commuter and light rail is obviously unaffordable. Some mental gymnastics going on there.
There should be nothing confusing about it. The Metro Link is going to get built but has taken over 20 years and the cost will be 10's of billions. You start with a good ring road for buses, trucks and cars to use as a basis for transport, then move onto trams and commuter links.
The n6 and r338 are the ring road. It's absurd concept to say something else is needed. N17 could do with the upgrading to include shoulders. I have been stuck in a bad spot without room.
It's basically a planning issue in that the plans were flawed in a way that allowed some objections to succeed and the way objections are handled in general has been disfunctional
It’s the same issue as Letterkenny, which is a much smaller town that’s at a constant standstill because there’s only one bridge into town.
Assume other towns have the same issue, where they grew massively but road infrastructure never really improved in time. Half measures like making roads one way and adding traffic lights to roundabouts.
Depends how you define it. Significant parts of Dublin's commuter belt are outside a 15km radius, say. Even 30km only barely takes in Balbriggan and Greystones.
I mean if you're insisting on it being just county Dublin, then, sure, I suppose (at least for 30km; lots of County Dublin's outside the 15km radius), but that would be slightly weird. London, say, sprawls over a bunch of counties. (Strictly speaking, it's all Greater London now, but only because they declared it was Greater London in 1965.) County Dublin mostly no longer exists as an administrative area, anyway (it's a bit of a mess, in that there are a few things, like the gardai, where it's still considered a single administrative area, but it doesn't have a local authority).
Nobody is living 5km from the centre of Kilkenny and claiming that they live in the “city” (which is only a ceremonial title anyway), let alone 15km or 30km
Drawing a random sized circle around the centre of a city is not how you measure its population.
Yeah, but someone living 30km south of Kilkenny only lives 15km from Waterford. Clearly they’re more in Waterford’s sphere of influence than Kilkenny’s. Yet they’re equally counted in both. It’s not really measuring anything.
It’s a mid-sized European city by scale of metro area. Basically same kinda scale as Stockholm, Copenhagen etc.
Cork’s metro area is lower-mid size European city moving into the kind of scale range of Nantes, Bonn, Aarhus, Bergen, Bristol etc
Belfast is in the firmly mid sized city category.
The rest are small cities, but growing fast. I wouldn’t get carried away with British ideas of what a town and what’s a city. It doesn’t really matter at that scale - just terminology. Limerick, Galway, Waterford and Derry all have the fundamentals of a city, not a town and they’re serous hubs for their respective regions.
The only thing I would say is Derry really needs much better connectivity and a big investment in serious 3rd level is still sorely missing. It should have had something developed on the scale of UL. That also would have big positives for Donegal and much of west Ulster.
Where Irish cities don’t compare is they’re low density. So the metro areas are physically very large but still urban. They compare to western France, some U.K., Nordic and even German cities.
They do not compare directly with Spain or eastern EU members which have a history of dense, low-mid rise apartments etc
The most comparable layouts are actually not in Europe but rather in mid size Canadian cities, Australia and NZ - less so the U.S. as it is a bit more extreme, but some U.S. cities, particularly older ones in New England etc are a close match.
The downside is Irish layouts struggle with public transit as the densities aren’t there - so you get long, corridor type lines - Luas and DART both look more like what you’d see in say Sydney or Melbourne plans than in a Spanish city.
A good friend of mine is Chinese and I remember them telling me they came from a “third tier” city in the middle of nowhere in China. The city has a population of something like 12 million.
It’s a genuinely eye opening exercise to look up cities around the world which you may never have heard of and see the populations. Entire cities, vastly larger than Ireland, and it would never cross your radar.
Chinese cities often take the piss with how city limits are defined too though. For example, Chongqing has an official population of over 32 million, but the city limits cover over 82,000 square kilometres, which is about the same size as the island of Ireland.
Shenzhen is the 4th biggest city in China and has like 7 million in its urban area. China’s “city” regions take in gigantic rural areas the size of countries
Well that’s a different argument then.
Just think we’d be codding ourselves to be saying Dublin City has a population of 1.7 million people and included places as far away as Maynooth and Greystones in that number.
In a Metro context, both are imo. The CSO use the BUA definition which cuts the likes of Bray off. That solely because there’s a golf course there along with a historic “big house”.
What's hilarious is your lack of scope of comparison internationally. Is it bigger than the other Irish cities? Obviously, that's not difficult to achieve, they're actually towns in reality. It's comparable to other European capital cities like Copenhagen, Vienna etc. All of these are still not 'big' cities globally, they're small/mid sized cities. Actual big cities would be London, New York, Tokyo, Sao Paolo etc. Spend time in any of these and then return to Dublin and you'll see why people view it as just a large town
You can walk across the centre of Dublin through the major areas within 20-30mins. Purely from a design and aesthetic layout as well it really is developed just like a large town, because of the incompetent planners and council who want it to remain like that.
In China alone there are 100+ cities larger than Dublin. I live in a city with similar population to all of Ireland and it’s considered small here. Asia, 250 cities larger than Dublin. Cant beat a small city like Dublin in my opinion, but there’s a lot that needs improved obviously
Amsterdam would be in the same category as Dublin and the others, a bit more to it than Dublin but still small/mid sized. Europe is actually a small continent and our cities are generally small
What's hilarious is your lack of scope of comparison internationally. Is it bigger than the other Irish cities? Obviously, that's not difficult to achieve, they're actually towns in reality.
This idea that regional Irish cities like Cork and Limerick wouldn't count as cities in other countries is a complete myth and needs to die.
There are a few cases where an urban area with a six-dogit population is c9nsidered just a town, but that's only because the settlement is in close proximity to a much larger city, or it's in a country that doesn't define cities by size in the first place
It's comparable to other European capital cities like Copenhagen, Vienna etc. All of these are still not 'big' cities globally, they're small/mid sized cities.
None of those are small cities. They're mid sized to upper mid sized.
Actual big cities would be London, New York, Tokyo, Sao Paolo etc.
That doesn't mean Dublin is a small city. Size categories are exponential, not linear.
> Spend time in any of these and then return to Dublin and you'll see why people view it as just a large town
In terms of look and feel, yes.
In terms of the actual size, no, that's not how it works.
You can walk across the centre of Dublin through the major areas within 20-30mins.
The size of a city is defined by the whole city, not just its centre.
Purely from a design and aesthetic layout as well it really is developed just like a large town, because of the incompetent planners and council who want it to remain like that.
Again, I agree in terms of how it feels, but that doesn't chnage what size the city actually is.
New York and London are basically Mega cities. Dublin is a big city anything above 2 million and you really get start getting teo or more cities with no clear border between them, they'll have multiple centres etc
I suppose it’s all relative. I’m from Liverpool originally and it has a population of 2.4m within 30km of Lime Street Station compared to 1.7m within 30km of Connolly Station and I’d consider them both medium size cities, with Belfast a small city and Cork/Derry being large towns.
For the UK it’s comparable to cities like Nottingham, Sheffield, Bristol, Newcastle and Glasgow at the 30km radius. Though these cities often lack the density at smaller radiuses.
The number for Cork at 15km is wrong. There are a 3 15k to 20k towns within that circle namely Cobh, Midleton and Carrigaline. You also would have Little Island, Glounthaune and Passage / Monkstown. That figure is over 300k easily and is more likely in the 350k range.
If you take in Midleton you lose Ballincollig and the population shrinks. Cork is a very linear urban area due to the geography so it suffers a bit with these measures but I don’t think it’s ridiculously out. Interestingly the harbour area suburbs of Cork Midleton, Passage, Carrigtwohill, Carrigaline, Cobh etc have a population of 140k, bigger than Limerick or Galway.
Politically, Ballincollig is now officially a suburb of Cork City, but it remains roughly three fields away from physically touching the urban sprawl of Cork’s western suburbs. It's no more a seperate town now than bishopstown or rochestown is.
If your from Cork you may be interested to know the same thing happened to Bishopstown and Wilton in my lifetime (52). Bishopstown was separated by a number of fields especially around the regional (cuh hospital) and the SMA church. We used play up there. So when I look at Ballincollig today, I’m seeing history repeat itself. It's being swallowed. Same thing happened around Douglas as well at the time. People still refer to Douglas village.
We have weak and small cities with expensive and difficult to fix transport issues because we favour living in detached houses on large plots scattered far into rural areas. It’s not suburbia but ruburbia! It has far more social and environmental negatives than any real positives other than satisfying selfish needs for large private houses isolated from everything even the neighbours. It means we have destroyed much of our countryside, murdered our village and town centres, prevented roaming on our beautiful landscapes and forced ourselves into cars to do everything like going to school, work and play. The local garage is the new village centre in many areas. Dublin has a huge footprint for a not very big city by international standards. The rest are essentially large to medium towns with similar low density issues. This has historically been the way we “plan” since the 60’s and despite some policy and planning law changes is still happening albeit to a somewhat lesser extent. We are a complete outlier in this regard yet we do little to nothing to fix it.
You should definitely experience living in a mega city for a period of your life. There is no thrill quite like it. Ireland cannot offer such a life and probably never will.
We have superb cultural output of the highest standard and fantastic engagement in sport. We are a very safe country. We are very well educated and have stable (if somewhat useless particularly at local level) government. We are generous and easy going and well liked internationally and by visitors.
Not exactly. Kilkenny is allowed to refer to itself as a city for “ceremonial purposes”. It used to be a city due to having a charter. But that’s no longer relevant. It’s why they’ve no city council. But the Kilkenny people absolutely explode when confronted with reality so you’re better off just referring to it as a city.
I Still find it ridiculous Limerick politicians think theyre the second city, which would've been fine to think if it didnt mean delaying a Cork to Limerick motorway. the current two lane road is so bloody dangerous for the traffic volume, they literally have blood on their hands from roads deaths.
Shows our fundamental problem. Dreadful spatial planning caused by bitter anti-urbanism and resentment of Dublin has left us with one and a half viable cities.
There’s nothing particularly unique about the stats.
Zipfs law says the second city should be half the size and their city one third the size etc.
Cork is somewhat undersized but the famine is big reason why. Some of what you refer to there is definitely a factor there in terms of sprawl. Agriculture playing a role.
The Dutch have vastly more 100,000+ cities, but you'd expect that with the population. Where we fall behind is that places like Scotland, Norway, Sweden, etc, all manage to have more of those 200,000 people-ish cities which facilitate transport, education, commerce, etc.
Im from Dublin originally but left Ireland about 15 years ago so obviously it has grown
After living in over 12 cities around the world and visited heaps more ive always just seen Dublin is a mid sized city, its a fucking great city but its not big or anything
Its very comparable to Oslo where I live now, compact and generally accessible, not too big , not too small
thats only the city council area, Dublin for all intents and purposes is a city state (province) which stretches from Carrickmines to Swords and has a population of around 1.2 million
In a few decades it will be the same in Cork as the city bleeds into the other orbital towns.
The Dublin one in particular is kind of meaningless. That's the size of the Dublin City local authority. You can walk from DCC into Fingal, DLR or SDCC and the only difference you'll notice is that the traffic lights change a bit (and, particularly in the case of SDCC, the bike lanes get really weird). Large parts of Fingal and nearly all of DLR and SDCC are pretty obviously Dublin, and are normally included in the Dublin Metro area.
And it's all pretty mutable. Rathmines and Pembroke used to be their own municipal authorities, for instance, and were folded into the City of Dublin in 1930. Did Dublin magically gain 50,000 people or so due to that administrative change? Clearly not by any reasonable definition.
(For an even more extreme example of this sort of thing, see the City of London, which has a population of about 8,000 people. Obviously no-one thinks that the City of London is the city called London, and nor have they for hundreds of years. The UK did, in fairness, rationalise this in the 60s by formalising Greater London; we haven't done that so far.)
Not really in Ireland? None of these overlap. You get some commuter towns but that’s worth counting. The sketchiest ones are Letterkenny counting with Derry and Ennis counting with Limerick but no matter how you compare there will always be some issue people can pick out
It does not need to be overlapping.
You cannot take the population of other cities in, for the one you pick arbitrarily.
There are exact ways of measuring a population of a city for a reason.
It is called census.
Okay, so what's a city? Like, the local authority region? Note that the City of London has a population of about 8,000. UCD is not in DCC, say, but I don't think that many would dispute that it's in Dublin City as people understand Dublin City. There are plenty of roads where your house might be in DCC, but next door is in Fingal or DLR or SDCC. It's a pretty arbitrary division, and the three other sub-counties are pretty new (DCC is roughly the same area as the old Dublin Corporation).
If you look at the figures within 15km, there's only 5k in the difference and Limerick city proper is bigger. I'd say Galway City proper is bigger than Derry, Derry has the more populated hinterland.
What does 'big' and 'really' mean here? Seems like arbitrary diameter that can be explained by any number of historic factors around residential densities.
You are double counting Belfast though. You obviously have to take the biggest settlement in the boundary. By your measure Salford is the third biggest city in the UK
Dublin is the 36th largest functional urban area in the EU per EUStat and the 369th largest urban area in the world per Demographia. These statistics both come with their own pros and cons but I would say they are relatively generous and give a better feel for where we stand internationally than the grown men in here arguing over what constitutes Big Small Cities and Small Big Cities.
the way we think about Dublin is outdated, and rather frankly bizarre. the idea that the city arbitrarily stops at two canals is rather silly at this stage.
In about 30-40 years the city will effectively stretch from Swords to Carrickmines (where massive development will take place (particularly with the metro)
Who says it stops at the canals? That's the city centre, not the city as a whole. I always thought anywhere that has a Dublin postcode (Dublin 1, Dublin 2 and so on) is in Dublin city. It's only when you get outside that that youre into the county.
That doesn't work either, though, in particular because it drops off so quickly in the southeast. Booterstown doesn't have a number! The Dublin numbers are due to a fairly arbitrary historical decision by An Post.
Even that number is based on some arguably weird decisions by the CSO which exclude, say, Malahide (which maybe made some sense 50 years ago, but is odd now).
Ah yes ChatGPT which is well known for never being confidently wrong🤣🤣
I'm from Belfast and the figure OP gave looks correct. In the 2021 census the metropolitan population was ~626k. There's several large towns that are within 30kms of Belfast that aren't included in the metro area: Antrim, Larne, Newtownards, Comber etc. So 700k would be impossible, 950k seems a lot more accurate
Well, strictly speaking, six other local authorities; County Dublin mostly doesn't formally exist any more. But it's kind of an arbitrary distinction, really. In the 2022 census, about 40% of the working population of Maynooth and Greystones commute into Dublin for work (it's presumably more, as in 2022 there was still a lot more work from home). Significant parts of those other counties are Dublin commuter towns.
Dublin seems about right as a small-mid-sized city when compared to other smaller European countries. Are Waterford and Kilkenny really considered to be cities? Not sure why but my brain thinks of Dublin and Belfast as cities and the rest medium-large towns. Surprised Limerick is larger than Galway too actually.
Dublin seems about right as a small-mid-sized city
Mid to upper mid sized city*
when compared to other smaller European countries
By international standards in general
Are Waterford and Kilkenny really considered to be cities
Waterford is fully considered a city. With a population of 60k, it's marginal by international standards.
Kilkenny's official situation is a bit complicated, but in terms of size, it's not one.
Not sure why but my brain thinks of Dublin and Belfast as cities and the rest medium-large towns.
Probably because of such lines being endlessly spouted on this sub by people who don't understand that city size categories are exponential, and that Reading being a town is in fact the exception, not the rule.
Surprised Limerick is larger than Galway too actually.
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u/Deisesupes 9h ago
Kilkenny will be delighted to be called a city.