One of the great pieties of the Irish state going back generations is its commitment to “balanced development between regions” as the recently revised National Development Plan describes it.
It was, and could be, a valid objective but the nature of the Irish economy since the 1960s has increasingly made it an unrealisable aspiration. The reason being that the economy is largely and increasingly driven by overseas companies who basically pay rent here in the form of a corporation tax that brings in a lot of money for the Irish state – and which is extremely favourable to the corporations.
The notion that these entities will decide to locate a data centre or plant in Leitrim or Conamara for example to help the state meet its “balanced regional development” target is absurd. The target of maintaining a balanced organic society ought not be absurd but it is.
To make it a realistic target, the Irish state would have to concentrate more on indigenous sustainable development, but it has rarely even bothered since the 1930s and the neglect and deliberate mothballing of fisheries, sugar, offshore energy and mineral resources, the possibility of having an independent nuclear energy option and so on, mean that that ship has sailed. Or, more aptly, been “decommissioned” like most of the sea fishing fleet.
As I pointed out four years ago here, the population estimates from the Central Statistics Office on which all of the ‘planning’ in the NDP was based had already shown to be off by hundreds of thousands in seven years of their being made.
The recently published Review admits that the estimates for 2040 now are “250,000 over that planned for in 2018 when the NPF (National Planning Framework) was first launched.” The current projection of 5.52 million in 2026 is over 200,000 above what was forecast so unless the State is assuming zero net migration over the next 15 years it will be out by significantly more than 250,000 by 2040.
The driving force behind that is mass immigration with 90% of the population increase currently and for the foreseeable future made up of people who were born overseas.
Where that relates to the promised “balanced regional development” is that the largest component of inward migration is the workforce that is attracted here from overseas. That workforce is increasingly from outside of Europe and supplemented by tens of thousands of dependents and indeed by students primarily attracted by the chance that their period of study might be followed by a job.
According to the NDP Review “To … ensure balanced development between regions, the NPF, revised in 2025, aims for a 50:50 distribution of future growth between the Eastern and Midland region, and the Southern and Northern and Western regions combined.”
The figures on work permits alone and the main companies who are being issued with them would suggest that not only will that balance not be attained but that the trend is in the opposite direction. An 2020 report on housing by Ronan Lyons described the Irish state as a “laggard in urbanisation.” Lyons forecast that 80% of people would live in urban areas by 2070.
This would be driven by the fact that the 20 most heavily populated urban population areas in 2016 were the locations for 83% of jobs.
That can be seen in the regional breakdown of where work permits are issued for. 64% of permits were issued to companies in the Dublin Midlands region between 2022 and the end of June, 2025. Dublin alone has accounted for half of more than 127,000 permits issued.
The imbalance is further evident when one looks at the figures for the main population centres close to Dublin in Kildare, Meath and Louth and add in those for the areas around Cork, Waterford, Limerick and Galway.
So far in 2025 those eight centres have been issued with 78% of the permits issued. Bear in mind that this does not account for EU citizens who come to take jobs here nor Irish citizens who take up a minority of the jobs being created in the major tech companies and indeed in the health sector which is issued with a huge number of permits to employ people from outside of Europe.
The conclusion from all of that is to make a shrewd guess that the ‘reviewed’ National Development Plan is likely to join the original on the shelves of fantasy fiction and books by lads who claimed to have discovered a failsafe system to make money from backing horses on the all-weather.
The fact is that you cannot ‘plan’ for anything from housing demand, schools, the Irish language, prison spaces, or jobs if the main factors that impact on any of them are almost completely outside of the control of the state.
State socialism based on ludicrously centralised and rigid ‘planning’ was an economic and social failure. There is, however, a happy medium and it is certainly not one more akin to a ‘wing and a prayer’ gamble on what might happen in the global economy even over the short term.
Worse again, even the state’s best case scenario – that overseas companies overwhelmingly staffed by people from overseas will continue to look on this place as a good place to be – will mean that the country will be unrecognisable within another two generations. One of the benefits of urbanisation might be if you have the means to flee to one of the ‘unbalanced’ rural enclaves left behind.