Where is Mayo's promised metropolis gone?

Time to move on twin-city approach between Castlebar and Westport

Mayo, like so many counties unused to congestion, is now grappling with rapid population growth, a worsening housing shortage and an undercurrent of helplessness.

Faith in government is thin.

A full year after the election, all we’ve seen is a dramatic pivot on migration rhetoric and some sternly worded statements about infrastructure delays.

We are told again and again that legislation is coming, that backlogs will ease, that we will soon see real movement on development.

The promises feel familiar.

Yet Mayo is not without glimmers of progress.

In Castlebar, the long-awaited youth centre at the old post office will breathe new life into the town’s historic heart.

A €1 million upgrade not wholescale transformation of the Mall, modest but certainly needed, should improve the area further.

The derelict Imperial Hotel and the Ellison Street sites, two of the county town’s most stubborn eyesores, are finally expected to see action in 2026, with completion likely the following year.

Slowly, Castlebar is finding its rhythm again after decades of austerity-imposed drift.

Christmas car parks are full, people are spending money locally and employment remains strong. Yes, Main Street is suffering, online shopping is claiming most small-town high streets the world over, but the wider picture is one of genuine economic activity and inward investment.

Mayo will always be rural at heart, but former national development plans have long identified Mayo and Roscommon as counties with towns capable of absorbing real population growth.

Our towns have been hollowed out by immigration and malaise, but that’s no longer reality.

To see populations continue to thrive and further rise, it will require jobs, yes — but also homes, and plenty of them.

Back in 2016, when the new N5 was announced, many asked why a dual carriageway should link two “rural” towns. It seemed extravagant.

Today, its value is obvious. Commuters glide past what used to be crawling holiday traffic, and locals no longer share the road with lines of campervans headed for the coast every summer.

But the real prize was always the vision behind it: a twin-city approach between Castlebar and Westport.

It’s a concept that still has huge potential.

Yet the Irish State’s reluctance to label any large town a “city” is consistently indicative of a fearful, risk-averse and cautious mindset, much like its approach to infrastructure delivery.

Ballina, for its part, makes a strong case of its own.

A compact town centre, coastal setting, cathedral skyline and the majestic Moy, all the ingredients of a city in waiting. But political momentum in recent decades has favoured west Mayo over the north, much to the frustration of Ballina’s representatives.

One policy that could genuinely shift the dial is the Living City Initiative, a clever scheme granting tax relief for refurbishing or converting properties in tired urban cores.

Once the preserve of Dublin, Galway, Cork, Limerick, Waterford and Kilkenny, it has since been extended to large regional towns like Dundalk, Drogheda, Letterkenny, Sligo and Athlone, so why not just bite the bullet and call them cities already? Northern Ireland has 6 cities inside its area, our 70 square kilometre state barely has 7.

There is still a great deal of disputes regarding what our cities are outside of Dublin, Cork, Limerick and Galway. Sligo, Kilkenny, Waterford just seemed to jump on the proposal themselves, true development plans with goals in mind would denote them on a map and posit tertiary cities in waiting.

Fine Gael Senator Mark Duffy has pushed for years to have the living cities scheme applied in Mayo, first as a councillor and again reiterating it in the Oireachats.

He aims for it to alleviate dereliction in his native Ballina, whose dereliction statistics would more than justify it. Extending this to Castlebar and Westport would be a logical next step.

A Castlebar–Westport urban partnership, a Mayo version of Minneapolis–St Paul in Minnesota if you will, should be something the entire county can rally behind. A shared identity, shared planning, shared ambition. A city, or at least a city-in-waiting, for the west.

It is the natural next move for a county on the rise. Population has ticked upwards since Covid, and the next census will show the full scale of that shift.

But time and again, the national reflex from the powers that be is to hesitate, to glance back at famine-era population decline, to fear “over-promoting” rural Ireland and ultimately to avoid placing pressure on civil servants to think big.

Meanwhile, our provincial towns are buzzing like never before. They should be recognised as major centres of population growth.

Castlebar will shortly gain a major new educational facility at the military barracks. ATU continues to grow, breaking student records annually. Ireland West Airport sits on our doorstep.

Meanwhile Galway is bursting at the seams. In many ways, the infrastructure in Mayo outweighs anything in Galway city.

Is it not time for Mayo to shoulder more of Connaught’s burden and benefit from it? Time to make this a county where people from all over Ireland come not just to visit, but to live, work and thrive.

If we’re serious about balanced regional development, the question isn’t whether Mayo should have a city.

It’s why on earth we don’t have one already.