Dublin and the east coast are bursting at the seams. Ireland needs another city

I f Ireland were a building then there would be a condemned sign nailed to the door. The country is so lopsided it is liable to topple into the Irish Sea from the disproportionate number of people living on one side of it.

More than half the State’s population is concentrated in Leinster, where the capital city is straining at the seams. It will take more than the powerwash prescribed, undiplomatically, by the US ambassador to Ireland to fix it. More urgently needed is somewhere else to share the load. Yet the Dublin -centric ethos of “build them and they’ll come” continues at a gallop.

Once upon a time, infill sites were gaps in back streets and side gardens. Now 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. With the population of the eastern and midlands region set to grow by at least another half-a-million people by 2040, it will soon be hard to tell where Dublin ends and Bray, Naas, Drogheda and Navan begin.

Project Ireland 2040 said as much when the €116 billion National Development Plan was launched eight years ago. About the same time, developer Seán Mulryan began hatching his own €5 billion plan to turn Athlone into Ireland’s sixth and most environmentally friendly city. Last June, he unveiled what he called a “credible blueprint for addressing Ireland’s demographic and environmental challenges”.

It is an Arcadian vision of 20,000 newly built zero-carbon homes, driverless electric buses, 100km of pedestrian and cycle paths, and 5,000 hectares of rewilded wetlands and rewetted bogs. At the centre of it all would be the existing Technological University of the Shannon , grown to 25,000 students and complemented by co-located companies and start-ups. The city’s creation would be funded privately and publicly, including with European Union grants.

Mulryan has said that, at a meeting with the Taoiseach, he quoted a figure of “a billion a year” for the first five years of constructing his vision for Ireland’s sixth city. A developer’s golden goose, the cynics among us might think, while eco-warriors may be alarmed at the absence of an environmentalist on Mulryan’s project board that is steering this promised “green” metropolis.

But there is much merit in the concept. It’s just that Mulryan’s city is in the wrong place.

Simon Harris announced last weekend that Fine Gael was drafting a plan for Ireland’s reunification , which would be ready by November. He said it would set out what a joined-up Ireland could entail in “practical terms, politically, economically and societally”. He should have said “geographically”, too.

In preparing for a reconfigured Ireland, the ideal place to create a new city is in the northwestern corner of the island. Donegal , Ireland’s fourth-biggest county and as far from Dublin as you can get without jumping into the sea and swimming towards Iceland, has long been regarded as the forgotten county. Its ability to attract investment was stymied by 30 years of overspill from the Troubles in neighbouring Northern Ireland . To this day, the county does not have a railway service connecting it to the rest of the Republic.

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The Economic & Social Research Institute has projected the Republic’s population will grow to as much as 6.3 million by 2040. At present, close to one million people live in the northern and western region compared with 2.7 million in the eastern and midlands region and 1.8 million in the southern region. While the southern region has three cities in Cork, Limerick and Waterford, the northern and western region has only Galway.

It may seem obvious, but the first item on the agenda for Irish unity has to be the removal of the Border. It follows that the second is stitching the two sides of it together. Sligo, Leitrim and Donegal have strong cross-Border links with counties Derry, Tyrone and Fermanagh. Part of Belleek is in Donegal. Lifford and Strabane are on either end of a bridge. The region is ready-made for administrative cohesion in a post-divided Ireland.

That makes Sligo the obvious location for the sixth city. The town is nearly as big as Athlone, with a population of more than 20,000. It, too, has a technological university, plus a hospital, a seaport, outlying beaches and vibrant arts and culture. The National Development Plan says there is “latent capacity for Sligo to enhance its regional role [by] building critical mass of population and further employment in tandem with enhanced accessibility and quality of life”.

In a borderless Ireland, Dublin would be geographically closer to the cities of Newry, Armagh, Lisburn and Belfast, accentuating the remoteness of the northern and western region. Derry City is that region’s natural sibling.

Galway, nearly a two-hour drive away, is the Republic’s nearest city to S…