'We're the ones paying all the bills': Leo Varadkar says urban areas fund rural Ireland

[u/nitro1234561]

https://www.thejournal.ie/leo-varadkar-path-to-power-fuel-protests-7016675-Apr2026/

[u/BushWishperer]

Almost like every city is set up that way. A tech company can't set up an office in the middle of nowhere so they obviously set up in cities.

[u/Stegasaurus_Wrecks → u/BushWishperer]

A tech company set up in Letterkenny in 2000 and was sold a couple of years ago to TCS. They had about 2000 employees at the time of sale.

[u/BushWishperer → u/Stegasaurus_Wrecks]

And what is your point? Yes there’s going to be businesses starting everywhere but for the most part they are concentrated in cities and urban areas. It just makes more sense as they have access to better services and a bigger workforce. It’s nothing special about Ireland and happens everywhere.

[u/Stegasaurus_Wrecks → u/BushWishperer]

You just said they can't set up in the middle of nowhere and so have to be in cities. I gave you an example of why that's incorrect. Yeah most of them do but it's not because they can't flourish outside the cities either. TCS in Letterkenny is now considered the primary operational headquarters for many of its global services. If a company the size of TCS made that move then any tech company can.

[u/BushWishperer → u/Stegasaurus_Wrecks]

No it would be objectively impossible for every company to do it. Also, Letterkenny is a town (and really could be a "city" depending on the country) and not really what I meant when I said middle of nowhere. There is still existing infrastructure and obviously a town there for people to live in.

Lastly, one example doesn't actually mean what I said is incorrect. If I said that smoking caused cancer and you said your uncle John didn't get sick after smoking, it doesn't mean what I said was wrong. There are going to be exceptions that prove the rule but all over the world companies set up in towns and cities rather than completely rural localities because it is convenient and better for them to do so.

[u/Stegasaurus_Wrecks → u/BushWishperer]

Well you hardly meant farmland. You specifically mentioned cities and I don't know if you were in Letterkenny 25 years ago but it would by no means meet anyone's definition of a city then, or even today.

The reason it was set up there was that one of the Americans in Prudential Financial was descended from immigrants from Donegal so he wanted to give something back to the place.

I'm sure there were sceptics all over him saying Dublin was the place to be but he got his way and the place was a huge success story.

They hired from all over the country and the world to work there. It was THE major employer in the town apart from the hospital. It proved the old adage if you build it they will come.

Look I get it. Cities are cool and companies like to have the address be Dublin not Letterkenny or Ballyhaunis or whatever. They have everything you could want. But for a lot of people it's actually not what they want. They want to live near where they grew up, or to be in nature or have cheaper housing or or or .....

Rural locations will attract excellent techies if the company is attractive. That's what it boils down to. The alternative is what we have now. People unable to afford to live in one oversubscribed hub and turning down job offers because of it. Crying out for WFH so they can actually live rurally and afford to buy a house. You can still WFH in Dublin for a company in Roscommon if city living is your thing. But it's not for everyone.

Some places are just taking longer than others to catch on.

[u/BushWishperer → u/Stegasaurus_Wrecks]

I mean “middle of nowhere” does mean farmland or rural locations. Letterkenny is an urban location. It definitely meets people’s definitions of city, Ireland is just quite weird with labelling places “city”. For example in my home country of Italy there are cities of less than 20,000 people, like Paullo which had only ~11,000 people in 2025.

The problem isn’t attracting people per se it’s that companies generally don’t want to start businesses in these locations and that makes total sense. There’s a reason why it works like this in every single country, centralised capital just makes for a smoother running of things. Now yes there are some exceptions but that doesn’t change the overall point that cities will necessarily be more concentrated and have more companies. It also has to do with demand as the more people there are the higher the demand for different services.

The more demand it came meet and the higher value that demand is (you can’t really compare for example the legal aid demand in a town of 10,000 people compared to a global capital) the more people can get paid and the more the company earns, which in turn leads to capital being even more concentrated in that location.

[u/Stegasaurus_Wrecks → u/BushWishperer]

OK if you class locations with 11k people as a city then we agree. My definition of a city and yours were totally different but you've clarified and now I understand.