Opinion | The Bridge to Nowhere: Why Britain Keeps Falling for Its Own Pipe Dreams

Estimated reading time: 8 minutes

By Peter Bouwhuis

Let me tell you something about big ideas. Everyone loves them. Politicians love them. Architects love them. The press loves them. And the public? Well, we eat them up too, at least until the bill arrives. The story of the Celtic Crossing, the proposed bridge or tunnel linking Scotland to Northern Ireland across the Irish Sea, is one of the most fascinating examples of a grand vision colliding head-on with reality. And honestly? It tells us more about British politics than it does about engineering.

I want to start at the beginning, because this idea is older than most people realise. The concept of linking Great Britain and Ireland was first floated in the late 19th century, dreamed up by industrialists and unionists who saw a strategic and commercial opportunity in connecting the two islands. It came back in 1915 during World War I, then again in the 1950s, and kept resurfacing like a rubber duck you cannot push underwater. Each time, the dream was dismissed as too expensive and unlikely to deliver enough economic return. In 1988, the Irish Minister of Tourism and Transport made the pointed observation that a sea tunnel between Ireland and Britain would cost roughly double what the Channel Tunnel cost, while attracting about a fifth of the traffic. That is a brutal ratio. And yet, the idea refused to die.

So why did it come back again in 2018? That is where things get genuinely interesting, because the answer has very little to do with engineering and almost everything to do with politics.

Brexit had thrown the United Kingdom into an identity crisis. Questions about Scotland’s future, the complicated relationship between Ireland, Britain, and Northern Ireland, and the broader question of what the UK even stood for as a nation were all swirling around at once. Into this chaos walked then Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, who floated the idea of building a bridge across the English Channel to France. Experts demolished the idea almost instantly, pointing out that it would cut through one of the busiest shipping lanes on the planet. Architect Alan Dunlop perhaps put it best when he quipped that it would be easier to just move France closer.

But here is the thing about Dunlop: he did not stop there. He took that moment of ridicule and pivoted. Rather than a bridge to France, he argued, why not build a bridge from Scotland to Northern Ireland? He argued it would be cheaper, more useful, and politically beneficial by counterbalancing the UK government’s heavy spending on London and the east coast. The idea gained traction fast, particularly with the Democratic Unionist Party in Northern Ireland. The DUP, which has long advocated against Irish nationalism and in favour of strengthening ties with Britain, saw the crossing as a way to bind Northern Ireland more tightly to the UK economically and symbolically. They pushed the concept through their connections with the Conservative Party, and before long, serious politicians were treating it as a serious proposal.

I will be honest. Reading about this, I felt a familiar sinking feeling. Not because the idea is entirely without merit, but because I have seen this movie before. A big, exciting project gets political momentum, critics get steamrolled, and then years later everyone quietly pretends it never happened. Still, let me give the concept its fair hearing.

There were four proposed routes across the Irish Sea. The so-called Irish Mail route, running 81 kilometres from Dublin to Anglesey in Wales, was never seriously considered by the Johnson government despite its relatively shallow seabed. Two of Dunlop’s routes focused on a Scotland to Northern Ireland crossing. The short route, just 20 kilometres, would connect the Mull of Kintyre to Torr Head in Northern Ireland. Sounds manageable, right? Except the Mull of Kintyre is, and I say this with no disrespect to anyone who lives there, essentially the middle of nowhere. Connecting it to the equally remote Torr Head would mean the British government would have to also build extensive roads and railways just to reach the bridge in the first place. You would be building a bridge to get to the bridge.

The more realistic option was the Galloway Route, running 45 kilometres from Portpatrick in Scotland to Larne in Northern Ireland. Larne sits just half an hour from Belfast, which makes it the obvious practical choice. But then there is Beaufort’s Dyke, a massive underwater trench sitting right in the path of this route with a maximum depth of 300 metres. And it is not just the depth that is the problem. After World War II, the British Ministry of Defence decided to dump approximately one million tons of unexploded munitions into Beaufort’s Dyke. One million tons. Of unexploded bombs. Locals on both sides of the strait have noted, with what I imagine was a mixture of dark humour and genuine alarm, that this ordnance has a habit of washing up on nearby beaches with alarming regularity. So the plan, to put it plainly, would involve building a massive infrastructure project on top of a submerged minefield. What could possibly go wrong?

Supporters pointed to pontoon bridge technology and submerged floating tunnel concepts as ways around the depth problem. The Øresund Bridge connecting Sweden and Denmark was often cited as proof that ambitious sea crossings could be done. But the Øresund is built on a route no deeper than ten metres. Comparing it to the Celtic Crossing is a bit like comparing a paddling pool to the Atlantic Ocean. The comparison does not hold up, and using it as a benchmark was always going to mislead people about the true scale of the challenge.

When Boris Johnson became Prime Minister in 2019, the Celtic Crossing suddenly had the most powerful political backer it had ever had. In February 2020, just days after Brexit formally took place, Downing Street announced it was commissioning feasibility studies. The optimists were excited. The sceptics, including local officials and residents on both sides of the crossing, were raising very practical concerns. One Scottish activist, Catherine Branson, pointed out that Portpatrick did not even have a two-lane road leading to where the terminal would need to be built. That detail alone tells you a great deal about the gap between vision and reality.

The study results, released in November 2021, were nothing short of devastating for the project’s supporters. A tunnel would cost £205 billion. A bridge would cost £335 billion. Both options would require massive infrastructure upgrades on the Scottish and Northern Irish sides. Both would take at least 30 years to complete in the most optimistic scenario. And the study itself cost British taxpayers nearly a million pounds just to produce. Alan Dunlop expressed confusion about how the cost could have ballooned to over £200 billion when his own estimates had suggested something closer to £20 billion. That is a tenfold difference. Whether that reflects flawed initial estimates, political wishful thinking, or something in between, it is a gap that cannot simply be explained away.

And that, really, is the heart of my frustration with this whole saga. Not the ambition itself. Ambition is fine. Big ideas are not inherently bad. What bothers me is the pattern. The Celtic Crossing was not evaluated dispassionately on its merits. It was picked up because it served a political moment, given momentum by politicians who needed symbolic wins during a turbulent period, and then dropped just as quickly once the numbers made it untenable. The people living near Portpatrick and Larne did not need a feasibility study to know the idea had problems. They knew it from the start.

Britain has a complicated relationship with its own ambitions. There is something deeply endearing about the national appetite for grand projects, and something equally maddening about the tendency to skip the basic homework before announcing them to the world. The Celtic Crossing joins a long list of megaprojects that have burned up political energy, public money, and journalistic column inches before fading into history. The dream of connecting Britain and Ireland by fixed link has now been killed and revived so many times that it has almost become tradition. Maybe that is what it is. Not a serious infrastructure proposal, but a recurring ritual. A way of gesturing toward unity and ambition without ever having to actually do the hard, unglamorous work of making it happen.

For now, the Celtic Crossing is, as the study concluded, an order of magnitude too expensive, too dangerous, and too complicated to build. And unless someone discovers a way to relocate a million tons of old bombs, calm the Irish Sea, flatten a 300-metre underwater trench, and find a few hundred billion pounds down the back of a sofa, that is unlikely to change.

Some dreams are worth chasing. This one, I am afraid, is not.

_{Source: megaprojects/msc}