Proximity to City - Ireland Liveability Index

This section attempts to capture the desire for people to access the facilities that cities have to offer. Not everyone wants to live in a city but the majority of people want to have easy access to one. The presence of a city nearby adds to the liveability index of a county. In order to be able to rank counties on their proximity to a Hub City (Belfast, Cork, Derry, Dublin, Galway, Limerick or Waterford), we found the population centre for each county and then calculated the distance from that population centre to the nearest Hub City.

Location of County Population Centres Relative to Nearest City

The average person in county Dublin lives 2 km from Dublin City centre, as a result county Dublin receives a top liveability score of 100. The residents of counties Cork, Galway, Limerick and Waterford have short distances to travel to their respective cities and as a result also score highly. It should be noted that for some counties their residents could be closest to more than one city depending on which part of the county they live in. The best example of this is Tipperary, a resident of this county could be closest to Galway, Limerick, Cork or Waterford. However, the population centre in Tipperary is closest to Limerick City and that is the defined Hub City for that county. Interestingly, Cork City is the Hub City only for occupants of county Cork. The residents of County Leitrim are the furthest from any Hub City.

Rank	County	Distance to City (km)	Hub City	Liveability Score
1	Dublin	2	Dublin	100
2	Cork	7	Cork	95
3	Galway	9	Galway	93
4	Limerick	10	Limerick	92
5	Waterford	16	Waterford	87
6	Clare	27	Limerick	77
7	Donegal	31	Derry	73
8	Kildare	35	Dublin	70
8	Wicklow	35	Dublin	70
10	Kilkenny	37	Waterford	68
10	Meath	37	Dublin	68
12	Wexford	45	Waterford	61
13	Tipperary	50	Limerick	57
14	Louth	59	Dublin	48
15	Carlow	62	Waterford	46
16	Mayo	69	Galway	39
17	Roscommon	71	Galway	38
18	Laois	79	Dublin	30
19	Monaghan	81	Belfast	29
20	Westmeath	84	Dublin	25
21	Kerry	87	Limerick	23
21	Offaly	87	Dublin	23
23	Cavan	95	Dublin	16
24	Longford	100	Galway	12
25	Sligo	108	Galway	4
26	Leitrim	113	Galway	0

Methodology

For the purpose of this analysis, we define proximity to city as the minimum straight line distance from the mean center of population (COP) of each county to the center of the nearest city. A city is defined as a human settlement with a population in excess of 50,000.

The mean COP is defined as the balance point of a rigid, flat, weightless map if each person is represented as a point of equal mass. Mathematically, this is equivalent to finding the mean coordinates of each person in the region’s population. We calculate the mean COP for each county using small area population data from the 2011 census of Ireland. The geometric center point of each small area in a county is found and a weighting equivalent to the area’s population is applied. The mean COP for the county can then be found using the mean coordinates algorithm in QGIS.

Having found the COP of each county the distance to the nearest city can be found easily in QGIS using the distance to nearest hub algorithm. We take the cities of Ireland to be: Dublin, Cork, Limerick, Galway, and Waterford. However, for some counties the nearest city may be in Northern Ireland. To account for this we include Belfast and Derry as cities in our analysis. The center of the city is defined as the geometric center point.