There has been much good and important talk in the pages of this publication in recent years about building bridges, but now comes a moment when we move from metaphor to concrete. Or, in this case, to reinforced concrete and buttresses and steel cables.
In Great Britain momentum is gathering around a proposal to build an actual bridge between Northern Ireland and Scotland, creating a fixed link between two of the current United Kingdom’s four constituent nations. This would be an imaginative suggestion at any time, not least given the historically troubled relationship between the two states. But it gains added piquancy at this moment when the vexed question of how to account for Northern Ireland in the omnishambles that Brexit has become could sink the negotiation beneath the Irish Sea’s waves.
People are saying the bridge is a serious idea, and it has at least captured the interest of leading politicians on both sides of the water. A leading architect, Alan Dunlop, has become an enthusiastic advocate for the proposal, now dubbed the “Celtic Bridge.” The architect and academic, who has taught at Kansas State University, is pressing the four governments involved—the United Kingdom’s Westminster in London, the devolved administrations of both Northern Ireland and Scotland, and the Irish government in Dublin—to begin a serious study of the proposal’s feasibility, investigating both the civil engineering requirements and the economic case for the bridge.
People are saying the bridge is a serious idea, and it has at least captured the interest of leading politicians on both sides of the water.
Technically, say the bridge’s proponents, there are no insuperable hindrances. It often comes as a surprise to people that the shortest distance between the two Celtic countries is only 12 miles. Unhappily, a bridge spanning that particular gap is not feasible, as its eastern side in Scotland’s Kintyre is remote without the necessary major roads or rail line to the population centers and arterial routes. The sea channel also presents one particularly awkward obstacle: the Beaufort’s Dyke, a deep underwater trough. London’s Ministry of Defense has admitted that they have been dumping over a million tons of munitions there since early in the 20th century. Contemporary weaponry could raise a problem too, as the Clyde Estuary just to the north is the only route to the open sea for the contentious British maritime nuclear force, based at Faslane in Argyll.
Accusations and rumors have flown around for years that potentially rich subsea mineral deposits were left unextracted in this area, owing to the presence of the nuclear subs. A comparable resistance to development in this area might surface from the military.
Celtic Bridge proponents point to other connections successfully constructed in difficult situations, among them the Øresund Bridge, built 18 years ago to link Malmö in Sweden and Copenhagen in Denmark. They point out that two separate countries, sharing a Nordic heritage, worked closely to construct the link that is now used by 25 million travelers each year, generating so far a $13.1 billion return on investment.
Elsewhere in Scandinavia, oil-rich Norway, with a population similar to Scotland’s but one that has been able to retain more of its oil revenues, is investing $47 billion on the Norwegian Coastal Highway, a 1,100-kilometer route that will cross 20 fjords, some more than 2,000 feet deep. Some construction techniques developed by the offshore oil industry are available to designers. Mr. Dunlop told a recent architectural conference: “We have the engineering and architectural talent and the capability to build this project; it would be a transformative economic generator and a world first.” Estimates of costs for a combined road and rail link between Portpatrick in Galloway and Larne in Antrim range currently from $20 million to $26 million. Already, a much longer sea bridge—34 miles—is about to open in China, but at an enormous cost that includes, reportedly, a number of deaths among construction workers.
The Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland, whose 10 members of the U.K. Parliament have been keeping the beleaguered British prime minister in power, are interested in the project. Their stance on Brexit is to resist anything that remotely resembles a border between the province and the rest of the United Kingdom. Prime Minister Theresa May’s Conservative government, encouraged (to say the least) by the Ulster Unionists, is resisting anything detrimental to the integrity of the current United Kingdom. A physical fixed link, in this view, cements the relationship and thus explains the D.U.P.’s enthusiasm. There is political risk in this equation; drawing the Scots and the Northern Irish more closely together, given ancient kinships and far less enthusiasm in both populaces for leaving the European Union than in many parts of England, could cause cracks in the structure that, increasingly shakily, bonds the United Kingdom.
The Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland, whose 10 members of the U.K. Parliament have been keeping the beleaguered British prime minister in power, are interested in the project.
Negotiators have yet to find a solution that would realize the desire, held by virtually all the stakeholders, to avoid a return to a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic to the south and west. But, since Brexit would create a fixed border between the United Kingdom and the European Union, there are myriad complications about cross-border trade and customs arrangements; even possibly passport checks, which do not happen now for the many people who cross the invisible border daily.
Northern Ireland would no longer be part of the single European market; the Republic would continue to trade in it. No party in the talks has explained how a frictionless, seamless border would practically operate. It is an issue that may yet wreck the entire Brexit negotiation.
There would have been a time in living memory when the idea of a fixed link between Britain and Continental Europe was scoffed at, either as expensively fanciful or as a horrid assault on the sense of privileged exceptionalism displayed by some in this land. But the Channel Tunnel was built, continues to operate and now makes money.
Over the years, Euroskeptic Englanders got over the shock of, in a sense, no longer being an island when the Chunnel opened in 1994. A Celtic bridge over the troubled waters of Brexit, while intriguing, might not excite the same insular passions; after all, even the mythical giant Finn McCool fancied the idea, they say, and got as far as starting a causeway on the Antrim coast.
The Commission on Wednesday adopted a proposal to revise the routing of one of its strategic transport corridors to connect Dublin and Cork with the Belgian ports of Zeebrugge, abogados de accidentes and Antwerp and the Port of Rotterdam in the Netherlands, to channel trade directly from Ireland to mainland Europe after Brexit.
"the vexed question of how to account for Northern Ireland in the omnishambles that Brexit has become"
You win a million points on the word "omnishambles"
I think that will be a good step into the friendship. All we need to be connected by strong chains. it must be as chains that locked David Copperfield. Recently, I have been in Vegas in the show https://best-vegas.com/magic-shows/david-copperfield-show/. And I was really happy to remember all the fantastic things this fantastic man!