Portlaoise is two towns living in the same place. The first is the historical Maryborough, named after Queen Mary in 1557, anchored on Fort Protector - a Tudor garrison built in 1547-48 to defend English colonists from the O'More clan whose territory the settlers had just taken. The second is the modern commuter town, the fastest-growing of Ireland's twenty largest urban areas between 2011 and 2016, an hour by train to Dublin Heuston and forty minutes by motorway. The same streets carry both. The Tudor fort and the M7 motorway are five minutes apart on foot.
In the mid-1540s, the English Crown decided that the O'More clan of Loígis needed to be contained. Edward Bellingham, Lord Justice of Ireland under the boy-king Edward VI, ordered the construction of a fortification on a small ridge in the middle of the O'More territory. Fort Protector - named for Lord Protector Somerset - was completed in 1548. It was the first English star fort built in Ireland, and it became the seed of the plantation town that grew around it. In 1557, Queen Mary formally established the town, named it Maryborough for herself, and made it the administrative capital of her new Queen's County. The walls of the old fort still stand in the town center. Every August the Old Fort Festival sets up inside them - a three-day heritage event that puts living history into the very walls that were once the front line between English settlers and the dispossessed Irish.
On 4 November 1909, a four-man team in Portlaoise made the first powered flight ever achieved in Ireland. Frank and Louis Aldritt, William Rogers, and John Conroy had built their own aircraft - a fragile monoplane of wood, wire, and canvas - inspired by reports of the Wright brothers' flights. The King's County Chronicle reported the flight. The aircraft survived just long enough to make history before being packed away for the First World War, then forgotten in a shed and then a museum. More than fifty years later, William Rogers's son Joe found the plane in an English museum and brought it home. It is now restored and displayed in Portlaoise - the first aeroplane Ireland ever flew. The town has not forgotten that it was, briefly, the country's center of aviation. James Fitzmaurice, the Irish co-pilot of the 1928 east-west transatlantic crossing in the Bremen, was born here too.
Portlaoise is the location of two of Ireland's most important prisons. Portlaoise Prison, the country's maximum-security facility, houses the majority of Irish Republican prisoners sentenced in the Republic of Ireland - a list that includes IRA, INLA, and Continuity IRA members. During the Troubles it was the most heavily defended prison in Europe, with armed Defence Forces troops permanently stationed on the perimeter and helicopters on standby. The lockdown made the institution part of the town's identity. The neighbouring Midlands Prison opened in 2000 and holds longer-term general-population inmates. Together the two facilities employ a large fraction of the local workforce. The Department of Agriculture has its main office here. The Midland Regional Hospital sits on the south side of town. An Post runs its second-largest mail centre in the country at the Portlaoise depot. Portlaoise is a working town, full of state employees and shift workers.
Portlaoise sits at a crossroads. The M7 motorway running west from Dublin to Limerick passes the town to the south. The M8 to Cork branches off here. The railway station is one of the busiest outside Dublin: 32 trains a day go to Heuston and 30 come back, with ten of each running non-stop. The National Spatial Strategy in 2002 named Portlaoise as the location for Ireland's first "Inland Port" - a designation aimed at concentrating logistics, distribution, and warehouse industries away from the seaports. The town's industrial parks have filled with distribution centres ever since. The Coras Iompair Eireann rail depot southwest of town maintains all of Iarnrod Eireann's intercity railcars. The town is no longer producing flour and worsted fabric, the way it did until the mid-twentieth century. It is moving goods and people, and increasingly it is housing the people who move them.
Between 2006 and 2011, Portlaoise's population grew by 37.9 percent - the fastest growth of any large town in Ireland. From 2011 to 2016 it was the fastest-growing in the top 20. By 2022 it had 23,494 residents. Most of the newcomers were young families: the town has a high percentage of people under fifteen. New schools have followed. So has a leisure centre with a 25-meter pool, a skate park, and astroturf pitches. Robert Sheehan, the actor who played Klaus Hargreeves in The Umbrella Academy, was raised here. Stephen Hunt, the international footballer, was born here. The list of contemporary Portlaoise people leans heavily toward sport and entertainment - reflecting the kind of town it has become: young, growing, working, looking for jobs in Dublin in the morning and home for dinner in the evening. The Tudor fort sits in the middle of all of it, witness to four hundred and seventy years of a town that keeps reinventing itself.
Portlaoise sits at 53.03N, 7.30W in central County Laois, at the intersection of the M7 (Dublin-Limerick) and M8 (Dublin-Cork) motorways. The town occupies a low ridge that gives a long view east to the Rock of Dunamase, the limestone outcrop crowned by a ruined twelfth-century castle six kilometers away. The Slieve Bloom Mountains rise to the northwest. Dublin (EIDW) is 85 km northeast; Shannon (EINN) 95 km west. The town is on the main Dublin-Cork railway line; Portlaoise station is the terminus of the Dublin Heuston commuter service. From cruising altitude, the dense urban grid of Portlaoise stands out as the largest settlement in central Laois, with the M7 and M8 motorways visible as a Y-junction just south of the town.