Ireland's Second City

Cities around the world follow Zipf's law. The second city is a certain percentage smaller, third smaller again etc. With Dublin at 592,713 , Zipf (α=1) predicts the second city should be around 296,000 . Belfast is actually 348,005 — about 17% larger than the law would predict Cork at 222,333 (rank 3) fits pretty well — Zipf predicts ~197k.