Joined-up housing damages your health. Modesty forbids me to say I told you so, but the national health and lifestyle surveys 2003, published last week, leave no room for doubt. People in the east are fatter, drunker, smokier and druggier than the rest.
There are other broad-brush findings - women are healthier than men, which we already knew, and single people are healthier than those who are married, cohabiting, widowed, separated or divorced - unsurprising when you think about it. But these distinctions are minimised by the regional factor, which clearly relates to urbanisation.
The figures are an indictment of official policy and ideology over four decades of enabling the drift of human capital to the vortex of centrifugal forces. The destruction of de Valera's "rural idyll" has ended in the tears of the obese, the cancerous and the alcoholic.
It is vital that we not succumb to efforts by the same ideological forces that brought us here to spin the figures back into harmony with their discredited paradigm. Already there is talk about the alleged links between, for example, obesity and what they call "deprivation". Now they expect us to swallow the idea that poverty, once associated with emaciation, is synonymous with being overweight.
Behind the figures is a blacker picture. Fundamentally, the statistics reflect something deeper than public policy or education or even ideology: the grip of addictions on a psyche whose spiritual pilot-light has gone out, a nation suffering a creeping spiritual death.
The late great Dr Bartley Sheehan, being a coroner as well as a GP, had a doctor's wisdom about death and a coroner's wisdom about life. My journalistic questions, he told me one day as he groped my windpipe, were upside down. The puzzle, he said, was not why some people killed themselves but why the rest of us didn't. The reason we don't is that we have hope. Robbed of hope, we will find any number of exotic and roundabout ways of doing away with ourselves.
Hope is either material or spiritual and, if the latter, becomes faith.
Life without faith is an endurance made bearable only by comfort, sensation and illusion. Although the material world and its manifold mouthpieces try hard to conceal this from us, life of itself is going nowhere fast.
Without belief in something beyond, life is a headlong journey to the grave, punctuated by episodes of indulgence which are themselves part of an infrastructure of necessary illusion. We all need illusions and perhaps if I wished to indulge the unbelieving with a view to sucking them in, I might agree that the greatest illusion of all is that there is something beyond. But I would have to add that this is the one that, to say the least, damages us least.
Without that ultimate, if you like, illusion, a mortal life becomes grounded in idolatry - of money, sex, nicotine, sugar, dope, carbohy- drates or big cars.
And though we have spent the past 40 years - when we weren't busy constructing urban jungles - trying to paint God as the biggest illusion of all, in truth He is the safest, perhaps especially if He doesn't exist.
You need but to glance through last week's figures to see that somewhere in the logic flowing from Dr Sheehan's thesis lurks the explanation for everything.
If we see obesity, drunkenness and addiction as expressions of unhope arising from a confusion as to what life is - we perceive that the people in the most pain are those with the fewest choices, in this world or, in a sense, the next.
The only poverty that need concern us is poverty of spirit. The people suffering maximum pain are those who have been crammed into factory-farm estates devoid of either factories or farms, had their banks of hope and imagination burgled by bad planning and ignorant ideologies and had cavity-block walls flung between them and the possibility of illusion.
And unlike the rural poor, they also had their God confiscated by supposedly smarter minds intent upon denying them their opium in order to prove a point.
We didn't quite say, "Let 'em shoot heroin!" - but we may as well have.
Human beings need to be near to nature, as close as we get to knowledge of God. It is possible to live in the city and retain enough hope to avoid drinking, drugging or eating yourself to death, but only if you have the means to create your own illusions, worldly or otherwise: space, good neighbours, a country cottage, enough money to create enough dreams to keep at bay the sense that it is all ultimately going nowhere. Or maybe a comfortable prayer-mat stashed discreetly in the downstairs toilet.
And that's why the best arguments for decentralisation are irrational ones.