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Northern Ireland's Infrastructure Apartheid - The Solution

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gerjomarty

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I saw an interesting post on Slugger O'Toole today from Steve Bradley, regarding a potential plan for improvements to Northern Ireland's rail network.

https://sluggerotoole.com/2021/03/1...infrastructure-apartheid-part-2-the-solution/

[This] is the only part of the UK or Ireland that has not re-opened any mothballed railway lines this century, and the percentage of our infrastructure expenditure that is allocated to public transport is significantly lower than anywhere else in the UK. So whilst there is doubtless a case to be made for investment in certain road projects across NI, there is also no shortage of voices constantly demanding such expenditures – and particularly amongst our politicians. Meanwhile there are almost no high-profile figures continually championing the case for good quality public infrastructure that covers all of NI’s major towns, its airports and every one of its six counties. That would be the single greatest transformational investment that could be made to NI’s transport infrastructure, and it’s what is proposed here.

I was interested in what the denizens of this forum thought of the plan detailed here.

Obviously some of the projects further down the priority list will almost certainly never happen, but to be honest, some of the projects at the top of the list probably won't either.

This quote also resonated with me with the current administration talking about billion pound vanity infrastructure projects across the Irish Sea.

If the British Government is sincere about wanting to improve connectivity within and between the component parts of the UK, it could deliver transformative change and equality to our public transport network for less than a tenth of the cost of a bridge or tunnel to Scotland. Indeed – there simply must be no bridge or tunnel to Scotland without and until these improvements are delivered.
 
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HSTEd

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I'm not sure why its the British Government's responsibility to pay for cross border links to the Republic of Ireland.
 

berneyarms

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I'm not sure why its the British Government's responsibility to pay for cross border links to the Republic of Ireland.
I think improving the poor infrastructure within Northern Ireland (particularly west of the River Bann where it is worse) would be viewed by most people there as being more important than a vastly more expensive pie-in-the-sky fixed link to GB.

Isn't that part of the current UK-wide infrastructure review?

The article focusses on infrastructure within Northern Ireland, not specifically cross-border links. Any cross-border project would clearly be jointly funded with the Irish Government.
 

HSTEd

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The article focusses on infrastructure within Northern Ireland, not specifically cross-border links.

The map provided has at least two additional cross border rail links in it's "After" image.
 

berneyarms

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The map provided has at least two additional cross border rail links in it's "After" image.
They are only potential links, and I would see them as tenuous ones at that. But the point rests that any such links would be jointly-funded projects with Ireland. They certainly wouldn't be UK funded alone.

I think you probably don't understand the reality of how life exists in that part of the world. The daily cross-border traffic in the Northwest in particular is huge, with large numbers of people living on one side of the border and working or going to school on the other, and that works in both directions.

There's a need to improve the infrastructure across NI regardless, whether that be rail based or improved roads, to help the economy there improve.
 

Starmill

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I'm not sure why its the British Government's responsibility to pay for cross border links to the Republic of Ireland.
Same reason there's a railway tunnel between the UK and France, that there are motorways connecting Belgium abd the Netherlands, and that a rail and road tunnel is under construction between Germany and Denmark. They're all made under different mutually committed funding obligations, some with new international treaties. Of course the others have generally received a portion of of the mutually committed funding at the super-national level, but we made it clear we don't want that. In some cases the economically larger country has made a slightly larger proportional contribution in order to offer support to their direct neighbours. In others the smaller party has covered the majority of the cost in order to convince the larger one to put the relevant enabling infrastructure into place on their side of the border. Sometimes the benefits fall slightly more to one side than the other, and the costs are shared more in line with those.
 
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