The United States functions more like a continent than a country. As such, there is no one central city. Los Angeles exists for Hollywood, movies, glitz, celebrity. Miami is the nation’s second-best city: fun, louche, decadent, with the Latin influence. Chicago is the crown of the midwest, Atlanta a northern city in the south.
And then there is New York: technically the urban heart of the US but it has several contenders to the accolade. Like in France – with Paris, Lyons, Marseilles, Strasbourg, Nantes and Bordeaux – the metropolitan prestige is shared.
The precise opposite is the case in Ireland and the United Kingdom. Paris receives a touch of mirth from municipal France, but you do have the city for finance, and Lyons for food, Marseilles has the port and Strasbourg all those banal European diplomats. London, on the other hand, is the cultural, culinary, financial, political, service and media capital of the UK. Much the same for Dublin, with a small caveat for our decentralised pharmaceutical production. There are some global equivalences but Dublin and London are broadly exceptional in the West for this reason. The capitals of, well, everything.
And then just think of the scale. Galway is nice if a little chintzy, but with a population of about 86,000 it is just over half the size of Heidelberg (Germany’s 51st largest city by population size in 2021) and somewhat approximate to La Rochelle. Cork is about the same size as Boise, Idaho. These are all good places but hardly aortas of the nation. Limerick, with its 100,000 residents, is significantly smaller than Exeter in England – somewhere known for its university and almost nothing else. The point is that there is just one global city in Ireland – and it is not Waterford. Why, then, all the anti-Dublin bias?
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You do not need me to rattle off a list of prejudices against our capital. The city is too privileged, receives too much focus in the media, it is both a cause and symptom of Ireland’s regional inequality. “Hey, why do those guys get a booming and enriching tech sector! What about us?” We’ve heard it all before. We know the primary culprits are found in Cork. It might be largely harmless, a light jape between counties, something better resolved on the GAA pitch than in the column inches of a newspaper. But to be anti-Dublin might – just – border on the unpatriotic.
This is no case for continuing regional inequality – that’s real and should be thought of with great care and attention. But for the sake of efficiency that thinking might just be best done by the bright minds centralised in the nations’ capitals
Let me explain. Dublin is Ireland’s portal to the rest of the world. This is where political decisions that affect our relationship with Brussels and Washington are made. It is where Americans decide to set up their European headquarters, practically printing money for the Irish economy writ large. Yes, tourists come to Dingle, Killarney and Adare – but Tourism Ireland is in Dublin 2, and all those stirring videos about the Cliffs of Moher are cooked up in the capital. To look at all of this, and consider it an argument for decentralisation, rather than a valiant case for Dublin’s primacy, requires very creative mental gymnastics.
I am thinking of this now thanks to Britain’s new prime minister, Andy Burnham. The former mayor of Manchester makes a big deal of his northern credentials – he goes on about Oasis and Elbow, and when asked his “favourite biscuit” he responded: “Chips and gravy.” He speaks with that regional, friendly brogue. Good: not every leader of the country were I live can come from Eton with perfect received pronunciation. But Burnham too comes with an anti-London posture that is not just playful and rhetorical but will leak into policy.
Here is the bright idea: Number 10 of the north. Burnham plans to send significant functions of Downing Street to Manchester, transforming the city into the “nerve centre” of a “rewired Britain”. Mixed metaphors aside, might we question the logic of this slightly? The one thing civil servants – in Ireland and England – do not want is more bureaucratic friction. Slicing up an operation and moving half of it more than 200 miles away will do anything but streamline decision-making. This seems like a recipe for executive dysfunction. And for what? To prove that Andy is a nice guy and sneers partisanly on London like everyone else?
This is no case for continuing regional inequality – that’s real and should be thought of with great care and attention. But for the sake of efficiency that thinking might just be best done by the bright minds centralised in the nations’ capitals.
You might remember Charlie McCreevy’s feted decentralisation plan for Ireland in 2003 – and what happened to those 10,000 jobs for civil servants across the country? Well, the ambitious and upwardly mobile didn’t want to move, basic process was disrupted and the plan was abandoned. Try putting that to Burnham and see what he says.
And beyond arguments of government productivity, who would look at London, one of if not the world’s greatest cities, and say: I want this place to be less special, to be less celebrated, to be less ... good?
Back to Ireland with a mea culpa – of course I am prejudiced as a Dubliner myself. But I feel much the same about our capital. It is easy to snipe and eye-roll, to cry unfairness and imbalance.
But when I come back home I am constantly reminded of the city’s unique character and beauty and all those other mawkish cliches. More than that though, I wander around and Monty Python rattles through my head: What has Dublin ever done for us?
