Town comparison · Ballon vs Hacketstown
Compare othersBoth towns measured at town level, not the wider Eircode area, on the same 52 figures: prices, schools, amenities, social life, commute, affluence and safety.
Ballon, Co. Carlow · R93 · 801 people | Hacketstown, Co. Carlow · R93 · 653 people
Ballon aheadlevel or not comparableHacketstown ahead
Outlines are each town’s CSO Small Areas — the exact footprint every figure is measured over.
Resident population at the 2022 CSO census, summed over the Small Areas that make up each town. Not scored: a bigger town isn’t a better one, it just explains why the counts below differ.
Facilities in and around each town — each counted once, for the town it’s closest to. Bigger towns naturally score higher — read alongside population.
Places to eat, drink and go out in and around each town — each counted once, for the town it’s closest to. The residents per venue row is the fairer read — raw counts just track town size, so a big town wins by being big.
The errands you run without thinking about them. Same caveat — read the residents-per-service row alongside the counts.
Drive time from the town centre to each city centre — typical off-peak, with an estimated weekday rush hour. OSRM road routing.
Wider-area figures, not the town. Quality of life & rank are for the whole Eircode area each town sits in (Ballon → R93, Hacketstown → R93); safety & crime are the Kilkenny/Carlow Garda division — so they read identically for both towns.
Quality of Life is the equal-weighted average of these seven 0–100 dimensions, scored for the whole Eircode routing area (R93 / R93) from official data — Garda crime, CSO income & census, OPW flood, EPA water, and transport/healthcare/broadband coverage. Refreshed quarterly. The dashed line is each town’s overall score (that average) — dimensions to its right beat the average, to its left fall short. Two towns can share a score with a very different mix.
Pobal HP deprivation index, published per Electoral Division, so the spread shows the town’s poorest to richest ED. A town that is a single ED shows one mark, no range.
Prices come from individual PPR sales inside the town’s Small-Area boundary; schools, GPs, transport, gyms and parks are counted the same way; commute is routed from the town centre.
Published per Electoral Division and averaged across the town’s EDs, with a range where the town spans several.
Quality of life and rank are per Eircode routing key; safety and crime are the Garda division (Kilkenny/Carlow), coarser than a town, so two towns in the same county read the same.
Population growth isn’t shown: the 2016 and 2022 censuses don’t use the same Small Areas, and the areas that were re-cut are the ones that grew, so a like-for-like comparison understates growth badly. Rent and yield are still too sparse to show per town. Built from 5 CSO Small Areas.
The stronger town on the data.
Put any two Irish towns head to head, or step up to the wider Eircode areas.