That urban history has developed slowly in Ireland has long been acknowledged. Writing in 1981, David Harkness and Mary O’Dowd remarked that ‘[t]he study of the town in Ireland has too long been neglected’ and in a wide-ranging historiographical survey, published some five years later, Mary E. D aly made a similar point, highlighting a ‘past neglect of urban history’ in Ireland. For Daly, this ‘neglect’ was attributable to causes both scholarly and cultural. These included Irish historians’ tendency to focus on politics and the ‘struggle for national independence’, and ‘the popular belief that towns were somehow alien to Irish culture’. It should, however, be noted that a tendency to overlook the history of Ireland's urban centres was by no means unique to the twentieth century. Indeed, as Rosemary Sweet has demonstrated, while the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were marked, in England, by an ‘abundance of descriptive urban literature’, reflecting the ‘flourishing condition of English towns’, such literature was limited in Ireland. There, its production was hampered by a fragile ‘civic tradition’ and the hangovers of Ireland's troubled seventeenth century, which ‘left the eighteenth-century urban inhabitants a legacy of contested history’ that provided ‘a powerful check on the expression of communal sentiment’.

Whatever the causes, immediate or long-term, of the ‘neglect’ of urban history in Ireland, it appeared by the late 1980s that things were beginning to change: ‘the history of Irish towns and cities is being explored with an unprecedentedly high level of attention’, Daly observed in her 1986 survey, though this increased attention was not sufficient to prevent the conclusion that the study of urban history in Ireland remained at ‘an early stage’. In the intervening period, further development has taken place, though whether Irish urban history has today reached a point of full maturity is open to debate. Much work remains to be done and comparing Irish urban history with its British counterpart proves revealing, for in Ireland, as David Dickson has observed, ‘the pursuit of urban history has in recent decades been far weaker than in the neighbouring island’. Yet if we might conclude that Irish urban history continues to develop slowly, it is important to note that it has continued to develop. Whatever may be said of the speed of its development, urban history remains a fixture on the Irish historiographical scene and has recently shown encouraging signs of growth.