Bridge between NI and Scotland a great idea, insists PM... but it would cost £15bn
Is this what the ‘Boris Bridge’ would look like?
BORIS Johnson has said a bridge between Northern Ireland and Scotland would be “very good” — estimating the project would cost around £15bn.
The Prime Minister revealed his thoughts on the ambitious proposal as he spoke to schoolchildren playing with a model container ship onboard lighthouse tender, NLV Pharos, on the Thames.
Mr Johnson told the children that he had recently been discussing the possibility of constructing a bridge over the Irish Sea.
He said: “(I was talking yesterday) about building a bridge from Stranraer in Scotland to Larne in Northern Ireland — that would be very good. It would only cost about £15bn.”
Other estimates have put the cost at more than £20bn.
It follows reports that the Prime Minister has asked government officials for advice on the costs and risks of such a project.
Supporters of the bridge concept argue that it would help unite the UK by providing a new link between Ireland and Great Britain, as well as being a powerful symbol of UK engineering excellence and can-do spirit in the post-Brexit era.
If built, it would be around 28 miles long, crossing the Irish Sea from either Larne or Donaghadee, making landfall in Scotland near the small town of Portpatrick, in Galloway.
But the project faces many substantial obstacles — economic, political and technical.
The bridge has already become a political football — before it has even been built — with opinions for and against the proposal dividing along the usual unionist/nationalist lines.
While the DUP, whose 10 MPs support the Prime Minister’s minority government, supports plans for a bridge — which it hopes will bring economic benefits both to Northern Ireland and Scotland — other political parties see the idea as a waste of money.
Sinn Fein has described the bridge proposal as ‘fantasy politics,” while SDLP leader Colum Eastwood yesterday called the bridge a “distraction tactic”.
Economist Dr Esmond Birnie of Ulster University said the economic boost the bridge might add would come nowhere near to the cost of its construction and maintenance.
Dr Birnie suggested that the billions of pounds the bridge would cost — plus perhaps another billion for roads on either side — could be better spent on other infrastructure and social projects.
“Even on the most generous assumptions it is unlikely that the total measurable economic benefits of such a bridge would come anywhere close to its very considerable cost,” he said. The technical challenges facing the massive project remain formidable.
While longer bridges exist, none crosses such a distance over seas as deep and turbulent as the busy North Channel.
There is also the matter of more than one million tons of unexploded world war two munitions which were dumped in the Beaufort Dyke — a deep underwater depression which lies a few miles off the Galloway coast — exactly where any bridge would have to cross.
The road and rail infrastructure to Portpatrick would also need a major upgrade if a bridge to Northern Ireland were to be built. The rail link to the port was closed in 1950, while the direct rail route from Stranraer to Dumfries — and onward to Carlisle — was axed in 1964.
The busy A75 road from Carlisle to Stranraer — which passes through some of Scotland’s most picturesque countryside — would also have to be upgraded.
Mr Johnson first mooted the idea while he was serving as foreign secretary, telling the Sunday Times: “What we need to do is build a bridge between our islands.
“Why don’t we? Why don’t we? “There is so much more we can do, and what grieves me about the current approach to Brexit is that we are just in danger of not believing in ourselves, not believing in Britain.”
Mr Johnson also pushed the idea at the DUP’s annual conference in July.
He told delegates: “With infrastructure projects, finance is not the issue, the issue is political will, the issue is getting the business community to see that this could be something that works for them, the issue is getting popular demand and popular consent for a great infrastructure project — and that is why you need Stormont.”