Town comparison · Portlaoise (formerly Maryborough) vs The Swan
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.
Portlaoise (formerly Maryborough), Co. Laois · R32 · 23,120 people | The Swan, Co. Laois · R14 · 275 people
Portlaoise (formerly Maryborough) aheadlevel or not comparableThe Swan 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 (Portlaoise (formerly Maryborough) → R32, The Swan → R14); safety & crime are the Laois/Offaly Garda division.
Quality of Life is the equal-weighted average of these seven 0–100 dimensions, scored for the whole Eircode routing area (R32 / R14) 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 (Laois/Offaly), 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 80 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.