But it's nothing to do with failing to nail down the Heathrow slots in the flotation prospectus, or having government-appointed directors on the board, or calling EGMs. It's about the absolute failure over the last four decades of all governments in that time to develop a proper regional policy that would create four or five cities of scale to support proper infrastructure services.

Forget all the spin, the lobbying, the thousands of column inches devoted to the subject . . . the reasons behind the Aer Lingus decision to transfer its Heathrow slot from Shannon to Belfast can be summed up by the following line: population of Limerick City, 52,539; population of the Belfast Metropolitan Area, 700,000.

Which marketplace would you choose to operate from if you ran a commercial company, freed from the shackles of government interference? Case closed.

Looking through the recent census figures, the relatively small population figures for our main cities outside of Dublin is telling. Cork, the state's second city, has a population of just 119,418. Galway has 72,414 and Waterford has 45,748.

So, after Dublin, the four biggest cities in the state are home to less than 7% of the population. Meanwhile, Dublin . . . which continues to spread westwards like a US sunbelt city without the sun . . . accounts for almost 30% of the population.

The state's over-dependence on Dublin . . . and the resultant congestion, house prices and social problems . . . is widely accepted and much commented upon. But our absolute failure to develop alternative centres of population is at best ignored and at worst tacitly approved.

If politicians are serious about moving our dependence away from Dublin, then the only way of doing that is to develop three or four rival centres of population elsewhere. Only such centres can have the necessary scale to offer the job opportunities, social amenities, educational facilities, public transport etc necessary to attract large numbers of people away from Dublin.

But what has been the reaction of successive governments to this inarguable fact? Answer: nada, zip, sweet feck all.

Actually, it's worse than that. Successive governments have actively discouraged the development of proper cities in the state.

How? They have utterly failed to stop oneoff housing and ribbon development. They have encouraged (until multinationals simply refused to put up with it) the notion for decades of having an advance factory built in every tiny town in the country.

They have ignored the importance of having realistic population densities in our cities. They have introduced a National Spatial Strategy that created more hubs and gateways than a country the size of the US would need. They have introduced a decentralisation programme that didn't even use the already flawed National Spatial Strategy and proceeded to scatter a couple of hundred jobs here and there across every constituency in the state.

In the late 1960s, the Buchanan Report advocated that government policy and investment should focus on a small number of cities that would become centres for growth and a counterbalance to the chronic over-dependence on Dublin. It advocated that the cities be linked by high-speed railways and motorways. What happened to that report? Suffice to say, there is less dust around the foot of Mount Etna than has settled atop Buchanan.

Politicians ignored the report's findings because it would have meant upsetting local interests across the country. Politics won out over common sense. Advance thinking was sacrificed for advance factories. The kind of regional policies routinely practised across the world were jettisoned in favour of a 'something for everybody in the audience' approach.

And the results, unfortunately, are everywhere to be seen. From sprawling Dublin suburbs with massive traffic congestion and high car dependency to the blight of one-off housing along the west coast, high CO 2emissions, dire water supplies and, most recently, the loss of the Heathrow service for Shannon Airport.

The concept of the city . . . and the need for adequate population densities to ensure that infrastructural services are economically justifiable . . . has never fully been grasped in Ireland. Witness the politicians who, on one hand, rant and rave about the need for new rail services in rural Ireland and, on the other, fight toothand-nail against any restrictions on one-off housing. Remember the government tearing up its strict guidelines on retail warehouses to accommodate Ikea? And consider those who continue to argue that the best place for the national children's hospital is on the M50 (of all places), completely missing the point that the whole idea of a city is to centralise services in a relatively small area and then properly resource that area with transport, social amenities, housing etc.

What is really worrying is that, despite the 600,000 increase in the country's population over the past 10 years, urban populations in cities such as Cork and Limerick continue to decline. Meath, Kildare and Fingal accounted for almost 30% of the population rise in the last census. This is both a lost opportunity and a staggering indictment of official government policy over the past 40 years.

And if the narrow focus of the debate on the Aer Lingus decision at Shannon Airport is anything to go by, there is little sign of that changing.