Population density and population distribution are both concerned with the same question – where do people live? Population density is a straight forward measure of how many people are in an area per Km2. So for example, we take Ireland’s population of 4,600,000 and divide by the area of the Republic, which is 70, 283 km2. This gives a population density of approximately 65 people per km2. However, this number is for the entire country and if we look at individual counties in Ireland we see that the population is concentrated in certain areas, e.g. Dublin, Cork and other counties in the East – this is what we mean by population distribution (where are the people concentrated). In the West of Ireland the population is lower and the population density is much less than 65. For example, Mayo has a population density of 25 people per Km2 and Leitrim has an even lower density of 19. On the other hand, Dublin city has a population density of approximately 4,500 people per km2 as there are over a million people concentrated in a relatively small area.
Some reasons for the lower population density in the West of Ireland include:
- Mountainous land and poor soils, which are not good for farming
- Distance from large markets like Dublin and the UK
- Lack of third level colleges for education (just one university)
- Lack of good transport routes (just one motorway)
- History of emigration to Dublin, the UK and the USA
- Lack of job opportunities due to all of the above (the small population makes it difficult to maintain jobs)
As we saw in class, Australia has a population density of just 3 per km2, however if we look at population distribution we notice that most Australians live in the major cities along the coast, e.g. Sydney, Melbourne, Perth etc and very few people live in the interior as it is too dry and hot. In the map below, you can see that the Australian population is distributed along the coast, especially in the cities of the east and south east. Here the population density is much higher than 3.
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