Last year the Government initiated a National Spatial Strategy study, designed to tackle the thorny problem of how to secure a better distribution of economic activity and thus of population in our State. This is an important initiative for a country within which the population of the region around the capital has consistently grown much faster than elsewhere.
It is not, however, the first attempt to tackle this problem. In the mid-1960s Sean Lemass appointed consultants to recommend just such a strategy. The Buchanan report that emerged from this decision advised that the failed approach of dispersed development - trying to put a factory in every village - that had been followed during the early years of economic growth after 1959 should be abandoned.
That passive "strategy" - futile as a means of securing more balanced spatial development - should, they proposed, be replaced by one of concentrating growth around a relatively small number of population centres big enough to be able to develop a dynamism of their own. As they developed, these dynamic centres could gradually regenerate the towns in their hinterlands, and thus secure a balanced development of the whole area of the State.
Such a pattern of growth already existed in Dublin and Cork, each of which was surrounded by satellite towns, a number of which, even in the unfavourable conditions of sluggish growth that operated up to the end of the 1950s, had achieved a modest measure of industrial development, e.g. Balbriggan, Drogheda, Newbridge in the case of Dublin, and Midleton, Youghal and Mallow in the case of Cork.
This eminently sensible - not say selfevident - Buchanan recommendation produced an immediate negative reaction among politicians, because of their fears that votes would be lost in all the areas not chosen as primary growth centres. The Buchanan report was, therefore, dropped like a hot cake, and, as a result, the population of the Dublin region grew by 42 per cent during the ensuing 30 years, while that of the rest of the State rose by only 17 per cent.
Since the mid-1960s attempts to divert economic activity outside Dublin have effectively been confined to the arbitrary diversion of groups of civil servants to the constituencies of ministers, an abuse of power if ever there was one. And a more recent effort to generalise this process soon stalled in the face of an avalanche of demands by backbenchers to have bits of Departments allocated arbitrarily to all the towns in their constituencies.
However, last year Noel Dempsey, a serious politician whose efforts to reform aspects of our system have been consistently blocked by backwoodsmen in his party and among its satellite Independents, succeeded in securing agreement to a study for a National Spatial Strategy, on the basis that its authors would take two years to report, which would push any action beyond the next general election.
The strategy now in preparation naturally has to be based on some concept of how the population of the State would be likely to distribute itself if no serious efforts were made to curb the growth of Dublin in favour of other parts of the country.
Some weeks ago the Central Statistics Office published regional projections of our likely future population growth, which might be expected to fulfil this function. These projections caused quite a stir. There were headlines in the papers announcing that Dublin was going to swallow up the rest of the country.
And that, indeed, was what the CSO figures appeared to indicate. I was surprised by the scale of the disproportion between the CSO's projection of a population growth of 54 per cent for the Dublin region between 1996 and 2031 and its 8 per cent population growth projection for the rest of the country.
Not merely was this disproportion hugely greater than anything known in the past, it was also odd in that the CSO's own estimates of actual population growth for the four years between 1996 and 2000 - the first four years of its long-term projection period, which are solidly based on its own Quarterly National Household Surveys - have been showing the exact opposite trend.
What has emerged during these four recent years has in fact been something approaching a levelling-out of the population growth rates of the Dublin region and the rest of the State: the population of the rest of the country is estimated by the CSO to have risen by 5 per cent during this period, which is quite close to the 6.5 per cent growth shown for the population of the Dublin region.
In fact, for three important regions - Dublin, the mid-east and the west - the CSO estimates show population figures for last year which are quite out of line with the figures for 2001 in its new long-term projections. On the basis of CSO estimates of the actual population of those regions last year, the growth of Dublin during the first quinquennium of its 35-year vista, viz the years from 1996 and 2001, would appear to have been overestimated by as much as two-thirds, with the growth of the population of the mid-east and west regions underestimated by one-third.
The assumptions underlying the CSO's projections seem on the face of them to be reasonable. First, the CSO has assumed a long-term decrease in mortality rates.
Next, it had correctly assumed net immigration of 20,000 a year during this current period, declining gradually to 5,000 a year after 2011. And the regional breakdown of international emigration and immigration is based on the average of such flows between 1992 and 2000.
Finally, domestic migration within Ireland has also been based on past experience of such flows, which apparently have been consistent over several decades.
The large discrepancies between today's actual population pattern and the CSO's projections for the current year made several years ago and published last June thus seem something of a mystery.
This issue requires further study before the CSO projections are used as a basis for the National Spacial Strategy.
gfitzgerald@irish-times.ie