The United States functions more like a continent than a country. As such, there is no one central city. Los Angeles exists for Hollywood, movies, glitz, celebrity. Miami is the nation’s second-best city: fun, louche, decadent, with the Latin influence. Chicago is the crown of the midwest, Atlanta a northern city in the south.

And then there is New York: technically the urban heart of the US but it has several contenders to the accolade. Like in France – with Paris, Lyons, Marseilles, Strasbourg, Nantes and Bordeaux – the metropolitan prestige is shared.

The precise opposite is the case in Ireland and the United Kingdom. Paris receives a touch of mirth from municipal France, but you do have the city for finance, and Lyons for food, Marseilles has the port and Strasbourg all those banal European diplomats. London, on the other hand, is the cultural, culinary, financial, political, service and media capital of the UK. Much the same for Dublin, with a small caveat for our decentralised pharmaceutical production. There are some global equivalences but Dublin and London are broadly exceptional in the West for this reason. The capitals of, well, everything.

And then just think of the scale. Galway is nice if a little chintzy, but with a population of about 86,000 it is just over half the size of Heidelberg (Germany’s 51st largest city by population size in 2021) and somewhat approximate to La Rochelle. Cork is about the same size as Boise, Idaho. These are all good places but hardly aortas of the nation. Limerick, with its 100,000 residents, is........

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