WILL BORIS BRIDGE GET GREEN LIGHT?

As No10 confirms officials are assessing plans for link between Scotland and Northern Ireland...

RADICAL plans to build a bridge between Scotland and Northern Ireland are under way, Boris Johnson has confirmed.

The Prime Minister has commissioned ‘a range of government officials’ to examine whether building such a link across the Irish Sea is feasible.

If given the green light, it would be one of the most ambitious public infrastructure projects north of the Border in years, costing as much as £20billion to complete.

Two routes have been identified in the past – from Portpatrick, Wigtownshire, to Larne, or the Mull of Kintyre to the Antrim coast.

The project has the support of the

Scottish Conservatives, and could form part of the Prime Minister’s vision of ‘levelling up’ the United Kingdom by investing in major infrastructure projects around the four nations and the regions of England.

Boris Johnson’s spokesman said: ‘The Prime Minister has said it would have some merit – as a result you would expect government to be looking into it. Work is under way by a range of government officials.’

Mr Johnson has made clear in the past that he is interested in the idea of a bridge linking Scotland and Northern Ireland, and previously suggested the project could cost around £15billion.

The spokesman added that the proposed crossing – which would be almost 30 miles long – was a ‘proper piece of work’ and that Mr Johnson was ‘ambitious’ about infrastructure projects throughout the country.

Scottish Conservative acting leader Jackson Carlaw backed the move.

He told the Mail: ‘The Prime Minister has said he wants to look at it; the Taoiseach in Ireland has said that he would welcome the opportunity to look at this project.

‘It would be a link which would be great for business and commerce and so, if it is practical, I think we should be prepared to look at projects like that.

‘We are moving into an era where the rate of progress of what can be achieved is far quicker and far greater. Both governments have agreed that they are willing to look at a feasibility study.

There are some challenges, and these have been pointed out in terms of what the route would be, but there are longer bridges still that have been built elsewhere in the world so, in principle, it is not an impossible objective to achieve.’

Ian Firth, a fellow at the Institution of Civil Engineers, said: ‘My own feeling is that it ought to be possible because at the end of the day it’s about money – anything is possible if you throw enough money at it.

‘It has a huge number of technical challenges but that’s what us engineers are in the business of solving. I’m a great believer in the possible.’

A bridge between Portpatrick and Larne would involve crossing about 28 miles of open water.

The scoping work is being run from Number 10 with a range of officials reporting into it.

It is understood that any bridge could have at least one tunnelled section to cope with some of the difficulties caused by the depth of the Irish Sea.

It is thought that one of the designs could copy the style of the Oresund Bridge between Denmark and Sweden, which uses a mixture of bridge and a 2.5 mile tunnel. The crossing was the setting for The Bridge, a popular ‘Scandi-noir’ BBC series starring Sofia Helin and Killing Eve actor Kim Bodnia.

But some experts have warned that the depth of the Irish Sea and the presence of millions of tons of dumped munitions would cause problems for any project.

Beaufort’s Dyke, an underwater trench that is up to two miles wide and 1,000ft deep in places, lies seven miles off Portpatrick.

It was used as an undersea dumping ground for conventional and chemical munitions after the Second World War, and the Ministry of

Defence estimates there are a million tons of them at the bottom of the trench.

In November 2018, Mr Johnson said: ‘The problem is not the undersea Beaufort’s Dyke or lack of funds. The problem is an absence of political will.’

And last December the Prime Minister told MPs ‘watch this space’ when he was asked in Parliament about the prospect of building the bridge.

In 2015, the DUP asked then Prime Minister David Cameron to explore the idea of a bridge or a tunnel across the North Channel, and the party has said it will keep up the pressure for progress on Mr

Johnson’s proposal. However, the idea yesterday got a frosty reception from Nicola Sturgeon, who branded it a ‘diversionary tactic’. She said: ‘I don’t close my mind to suggestions like this. But I suspect from Boris Johnson it’s a diversionary tactic.’

The First Minister added: ‘If he has got £20billion to build such a bridge going spare at the moment – that could be spent on more important priorities.’

ONE Easter Monday, long ago, I was visiting the bonny Isle of Scalpay, just off the east coast of Harris, and waiting with some impatience, by the slipway, for the next sailing of its infrequent ferry – every hour or two and seldom after six in the evening.

Suddenly a car whizzed round the bend, screeched to a halt, and out sprang two strapping lads, Steven and ‘Fuggie’. It turned out they were heading to play in a football match on Lewis and, of necessity, would simply take their own boat over, left handy on the Harris side for their return late that night.

So they took me with them, propped in the bow as lookout as ‘Fuggie’ rowed us over that glassy sea, the tide at the flood and to the timeless cry of gulls, finally beaching our craft and clambering over boulders to the road.

Theirs was an instinctive seafaring world – and one nearing an end. Just five years later, Scalpay had a bridge.

I was reminded of that impromptu boat trip yesterday, as officials began a feasibility study into Boris Johnson’s latest big idea – a bridge between Scotland and the island of Ireland.

Bypasses and chunks of new motorway are always furiously assailed by environmentalists. There is much fury in the prettier parts of rural England about the construction of HS2. But everyone loves a bridge, that metaphor of reconciliation and coming together, a swoop over straits that divide us, a final farewell to the ferryman.

Folk forget just how many ferries we used to have in Scotland. As recently as 1960 we had six chain-ferries crossing the River Clyde alone, from Erskine to Finnieston. Before the Second World War, a winter drive from Glasgow to Skye would have entailed three crossings – at Ballachulish, Dornie and Kyleakin.

Venturing further, to northwest Sutherland, and into my lifetime you would have had to essay two more, at Strome and Kylesku. And, even on the East Coast, car ferries chugged across the Forth, the Tay and the Beauly Firth.

It could not endure. By the 1960s the craft at Ballachulish, Kyleakin and Strome struggled to handle the summer traffic and the Queensferry bottleneck was palpably hampering Scotland’s economy. The Forth Road Bridge, opened in 1964, was only the first of many that have since transformed our landscape.

Soon we had spanned the Tay (1966), the Clyde at Erskine (1971) and the Ballachulish narrows (1975). The Kessock Bridge was completed in 1982, transforming life in Inverness and the Black Isle; Kylesku in 1984, Dornoch in 1991 and Kyleakin in 1995.

The Clyde Tunnel (1963) and the Kingston Bridge (1970) put paid to Glasgow’s quaint cross-river ferries; we have since seen additional bridges across the Forth and there are now serious plans for one at Renfrew. Meanwhile, from 1990, the Western Isles were rapidly interlocking. The Uists, Grimsay and Benbecula had been conjoined for decades: Vatersay, Scalpay, Berneray and Eriskay now won their fixed links.

Expensive

So can we now bridge the North Channel, whizzing back and forth to Northern Ireland without resort to the drab and surprisingly expensive ferries? The answer is, of course, yes – granted funding and the political will.

But it would almost certainly not be by the shortest crossing, the 12-mile strait between the Mull of Kintyre and Torr Head in County Antrim: the roads are remote and so inadequate that essential improvements might well cost more than the bridge.

Longer, but far more convenient, is the 28-mile passage from Portpatrick, Wigtownshire, to Larne, scarcely half an hour from Belfast, and by excellent roads. Highways at the Dumfries and Galloway end would need upgrading, but the length of the bridge, though daunting, is not incredible: the Hong KongZhuhai-Macau Bridge, completed in 2018, is longer still and in far more exposed waters than the Irish Sea. (Indeed, it was deliberately engineered to withstand even a typhoon.) Nor is the North Channel especially busy; on average, 30 vessels a day sail through it. What sceptics have really seized on is Beaufort’s Dyke, a daunting underwater trench just off the Rhinns of Galloway.

Beaufort’s Dyke is 30 miles long, two miles wide and from 700ft to 1,000ft deep. Worse, after the Second World War, as the Admiralty and the War Office wound things down, it became a munitions dump.

More than a million tons of explosives were thrown into it, the Ministry of Defence admits, not to mention phosgene and sarin gas and, in the 1950s, at least two drums of nuclear waste. It is not the sort of place to have construction workers poking about.

Alan Dunlop, the Scottish architect who in 2018 gave the most detailed thought to date of a bridge here, insists that his suggested route would be north of the dodgiest bits of Beaufort’s Dyke. But he would still have to build over pretty deep water, where conventional suspension bridges, fixed-stay or cantilever designs would be impossible.

‘I don’t think there’s been any bridge built with that much depth,’ warns Ian Firth, an experienced structural engineer. But what Dunlop audaciously proposes is not a conventional bridge – rather, the combination of entire chains of stayed or suspension bridges through the relative shallows and a floating pontoon-style bridge, secured by cables to the seabed, for the deepest stretches.

Cynics howl, but Dunlop points out that ocean oil rigs have been deployed where the sea is up to 10,000ft deep. ‘This would be a challenging proposition,’ he concedes. ‘But we have the technology and the talent in Ireland and Scotland to create something as potentially brilliant as this.’

Whatever might be thrown over the North Channel would cost, Department of Transport officials estimate, some £15billion. Naeem Hussain, who has built some of the world’s most challenging bridges, thinks £20billion to £30billion is more realistic. Despite such eye-watering numbers, though, Dunlop, Firth and Hussain believe the bridge can be built – and that, fairly tolled, it would pay for itself in a couple of decades.

Most tempting for Boris Johnson would be its mighty symbolism – as an emblem of the abiding Union, and as a great British statement in the wake of Brexit.

But better still might be a rail bridge from Holyhead to Dublin, especially as a sweetener to a free trade deal with our nearest neighbour.

Some 40 per cent of Irish exports, wherever they finally end up, come through Britain; and the London to Dublin air route is the busiest in Europe – Ryanair and everyone else belching out CO2 in daunting quantities on all those shorthaul flights, when folk could whizz about by train instead.

Integration

Integration of our respective rail networks is not on – Irish trains run on tracks of a broader gauge and, indeed, are unique in Europe – but, although the 73-mile crossing is much longer, the sea is far shallower and there are no nasty trenches full of explosives. It would probably be no dearer to span than the hop from Larne to Portpatrick.

The British, of course, have never enthused about bigticket infrastructure. Elsewhere, attitudes are very different. Norwegians have built tunnels to mitigate the diversions forced upon country dwellers by all those fjords. The Faroe Islands boast connecting subsea tunnels and even a subsea roundabout.

The Danes and Germans are happily working on the Fehmarn Belt Fixed Link immersed tunnel, spanning 11 miles of the Baltic Sea; Finland and Estonia are in talks about a 30-mile subsea tunnel between their capitals.

So, there are precedents. But as we have seen with everything from Holyrood to HS2, the costs of such huge projects have an annoying habit of spiralling out of control. And in the end it could be cold hard cash that prevents Boris bridging the gap between his grand plan and glorious reality.

GRAHAM GRANT IS AWAY