Can you name the biggest cities in Ireland? If not, can you name at least 20 Irish towns or villages? And which of them are actually the biggest cities in Ireland? Well, the capitals of Dublin (in the Republic) and Belfast (in Northern Ireland) immediately come to mind, but what makes the grade behind the two heavy hitters? There may be some surprises here, as most of the time the cities of Ireland are reminiscent of a variety of villages that have somehow grown together, organically in some cases, less so in others.
Urbanization on the Emerald Isle
Take the capital of the Republic as an example: Dublin alone actually has more than a million inhabitants. And of them, only a fraction live in the city proper, and many suburbs occupy most of the population. And even in the city proper, you have “towns,” or neighborhoods, that are almost an ecosystem unto themselves, with the population generally not straying from a well-defined area (at least to the locals). Parishism in the capital … is not restricted to Leinster House.
When you leave Dublin (or Belfast, the other capital, for that matter, where parochialism has become an art form, with walls, barbed wire, and the occasional fights), you’ll also notice that most cities in the country They do not look alike. more but adult peoples. To be explored on foot (no Irish city really needs a car, in fact it is counterproductive to try to drive in Irish cities) within minutes, at least in the case of most county towns.
Note that Northern Ireland tends to skew the statistics a bit … with local government reform the new council areas in the (old) Six Counties grouped large areas together and called them ‘cities’, even when they consisted of a central proper urban area, with lots of more remote rural settlements. Craigavon is a good example of this with a sizable, but not large, city at the center of a cluster of urban areas.
The 20 largest Irish cities
But enough theory, let’s move on to the statistics. And the twenty largest cities in Ireland are:
- City of Dublin: 527,612 inhabitants in the central urban area (all that was once County Dublin had 1,273,069 inhabitants in 2011, the “metropolitan area” extends to 1.8 million people);
- Belfast (capital of Northern Ireland) – 333,871 inhabitants;
- Cork City – 119,230 inhabitants;
- Derry City (Northern Ireland) – 93,512 inhabitants;
- Galway City – 75,529 inhabitants;
- Lisburn (Northern Ireland) – 71,465 inhabitants;
- Castlereagh (Northern Ireland) – 67,000 inhabitants (taking all parts of the city together);
- Newtownabbey (Northern Ireland) – 62,056 inhabitants;
- Bangor (Northern Ireland) – 60,260 inhabitants;
- Craigavon (strictly speaking, an ‘urban area’, including Craigavon, Lurgan, Lough Neagh Nature Reserve, Portadown, Waringstown and Bleary, Northern Ireland), of about 60,000 inhabitants (but only about 16,000 in Craigavon Proper);
- Limerick City – 57,106 inhabitants;
- Waterford City – 46,732 residents;
- Swords: 42,738 inhabitants (urban and a part of the old county of Dublin);
- Drogheda – 30,393 inhabitants (urban);
- Dundalk – 31,149 inhabitants (urban);
- Newry (Northern Ireland) – 29,946 inhabitants;
- Ballymena (Northern Ireland) – 29,467 inhabitants;
- Newtownards (Northern Ireland) – 28,039 inhabitants.
- Carrickfergus (Northern Ireland) – 27,903 inhabitants;
- Bray – 26,852 inhabitants (urban);
Are these cities good for tourists?
One question remains for the tourist … which of these cities really deserve a visit? This is, of course, a totally personal decision (and can be influenced by factors such as where you want to visit family or friends, or where you can find cheap but convenient accommodations). But of the cities listed above, I would rank Lisburn, Castlereagh, Newtownabbey, Craigavon, Dundalk, Newry, Ballymena and Newtownards as having the lowest ‘tourist potential’, and Limerick City is a case of ‘beauty is in the eye of the spectator «.
Of course, this doesn’t necessarily mean that all of these places are garbage dumps (although some areas of many cities really deserve this derogatory nickname, such as the notorious’ garbage black spots’ highlighted each year), they just don’t scream ‘Come Visit Me! And while a stroll through, say, Newry can be interesting for an hour or so, most people would rather not spend much more time there, unless they hit the malls, again a totally different cauldron of fish. Frankly, Ireland has so much to offer, that you can find ‘better places’ almost everywhere nearby.
In the case of Newry and Dundalk, it would be the Morne Mountains or the Cooley Peninsula.
