A 21-mile bridge or tunnel connecting Scotland with Ireland would provide a "massive" boost for both countries, an Irish think tank has claimed.
A 21-mile bridge or tunnel connecting Scotland with Ireland would provide a "massive" boost for both countries, according to an Irish think tank.
The crossing, from County Antrim or County Down to Portpatrick, could form part of a Europe-wide rail network and offer an alternative to air travel, it said.
The notion is floated in a paper from Centre for Cross Border Studies, which admits it is "very, very ambitious".
But its author looks forward to the year 2030, when the European commuter or tourist could take a 220mph train from Dublin's Connolly Station at 4pm to Belfast Central by 4.40pm, be in Glasgow an hour-and-a-half later, London King's Cross at 8pm and Paris's Gare du Nord by 11.30pm.
"Wouldn't that turn even the most sceptical Ulsterman into an enthusiastic European?" said Andy Pollak, the centre's director who wrote the paper.
He conceded: "The arguments against such a hugely ambitious proposal can be easily listed, led by the extremely high cost of building a bridge or tunnel between two under-populated and peripheral regions of Britain and Ireland.
"The 22.5-mile road bridge between Shanghai and Ningbo, believed to be the longest sea-crossing bridge in the world, is costing around £750m in a country with one of the industrialised world's lowest labour costs.
"A more relevant comparison might be the £3.4bn the Irish government is proposing to spend on just a 10.5-mile rail link from Dublin Airport to the city centre. The Stranraer-Glasgow line would also have to be expensively upgraded. So a figure of £2bn or £3bn might be needed."
He said the arguments in favour were worth hearing too. A link would provide a massive social and economic boost to both parts of Ireland and Scotland, "something a lot of people, including the Taoiseach and Northern Irish and Scottish First Ministers, view as an unadulterated good".
It could also be one of the triggers to the next phase in Ireland's and Scotland's economic development. "It strikes me that the gains from building a bridge or tunnel across the north channel would outweigh the cost," Mr Pollak added.
There had been a a proposal in Ireland for an east coast line between Dublin and Wexford, stretching along a new high-speed rail link from Dublin to London, via a bridge linking Rosslare and South Wales.
"But the bridge to Wales would have to be 50 miles long, making it almost certainly an engineering and financial challenge too far," Mr Pollak said.
"We hope that maybe people more expert than us in engineering and raising finance might come in, we might get a bit of European money to do a study to see if this is feasible.
"Some work has to be done to see whether such a massive project would be feasible."
Historian Professor Jim Hunter, former chairman of Highlands and Islands Enterprise (HIE), said last night: "I do not think it should be dismissed out of hand. In fact, it is not a million miles away from a paper I presented to ministers while I was at HIE.
"I argued for access to Europe by way of a fast train system in Scotland with a similar development in Ireland. I had not proposed a bridge or tunnel but a very fast ferry service to link them. But it would mean you could travel from Inverness to Cork, and from either to Europe."
