EMERGING from Covid gloom, there is more need than ever for creativity, ideas, vision to conjure up jobs and put communities back on their feet. The role of government is to support all this while coming up with a few decent strategies of its own.
While waiting for the latter, let’s get behind the former. One part of Scotland which is fast off the starting blocks is Kintyre with the launch of K66, promoting the long road down to Campbeltown as a south-westerly response to the successful North Coast 500 which has opened up parts of the Highlands to more people.
Presumably for the purpose of getting to the magic number 66, the route actually starts at Kennacraig with Campbeltown as a mid-point before the traveller heads up the east Kintyre B-road to complete the loop. It is an imaginative piece of marketing and I hope it brings success and prosperity.
I was recently in Campbeltown, a place I have known for many years, and it was looking badly in need of a decent economic break. The same can be said of many Scottish towns; maybe it was more striking there because a couple of prominent buildings in the main street have fallen into dereliction.
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Often, towns that suffer the same symptoms need to find a new purpose. The enigma of Campbeltown lies in an obvious solution being available. In spite of K66’s efforts, the image will persist of an isolated town at the end of the road rather half way to anywhere. Yet a glance at the map shows this need not be true and historically was the opposite of current reality.
A century ago, Campbeltown was the whisky capital of the world. No other Scottish town ever had 30 distilleries. The art of distilling came from the glens of Antrim. The traffic between Argyll and Antrim was constant. Campbeltown thrived on whisky and fish. The geography has not changed but the connections are crying out to be restored in modern form.
At its closest point, the Kintyre coast lies just 11 nautical miles from Antrim – scarcely an unbridgeable gap, either literally or metaphorically. I am by no means dismissive of the bridge idea between Scotland and the north of Ireland. The fact Boris Johnson has been associated with it does not seem a good enough reason to treat it as ridiculous. If it was to happen, the claim of Kintyre should certainly be considered.
Meantime, however, there is a more modest proposition to act upon – restoration of a vehicle-carrying ferry service between Campbeltown and Ballycastle. This is the means by which Campbeltown could be back at the centre an arterial link between the coasts of Scotland and Ireland, a natural continuum that goes back all the way to the days of St Columba.
It is now almost half a century since Western Ferries, in their infancy, operated between Campbeltown and Red Bay on the Antrim coast. It was seasonal and successful and only came to an end because of security concerns at the time. The authorities wanted as few points of entry into the north as possible and Red Bay was not one of them.
In the 1990s, there was a campaign to restore a Campbeltown-Ballycastle link. Caledonian MacBrayne, then run by Colin Paterson who was one of the good guys, wanted to use an ageing car ferry called the Claymore. The ideology of the day intervened and the Tory-run Scottish Office forced the sale of the Claymore to Sea Containers for next to nothing. It was a disaster for everyone other than Sea Containers.
Their interest in the route was minimal. They ran the Claymore for three years then sold her off as soon as subsidy ran out. Once again, Kintyre lost out to circumstances that were entirely beyond its control. At that time, in 2000, the tourism industry in Kintyre said that “marketing of the service was appallingly handled for the whole three-year period”.
As a Minister, I tried again through CalMac but ran into bitter opposition from the big Stranraer/Cairnryan operators although only a flea-bite of the overall traffic would have been at stake. I remember from that time, a meeting in Ballycastle to which the local MP, Rev Ian Paisley, turned out to lend full support. I still have that rare picture of us singing form the same song-sheet. In the end, invocation of the civil service’s best friend for killing off anything they did not fancy – “EU state aid rules” – outlived my usefulness.
Hopefully, if Brexit has anything positive to offer, it will be the removal of such impediments to sensible, innovative projects within the remit of Scotland and the UK. There is a very fair chance that a Campbeltown-Ballycastle ferry would be economically viable even if it needed a helping hand in its early stages. But we will never find out if it is never tried. The infrastructure built and paid for in the 1990s still exists.
It is not the time to suggest CalMac should be handed anything additional, so I will avoid that option. There is continuing local belief in the potential, reflected in a popular passenger ferry service. The money involved is not huge. Here is an opportunity for a bit of home-grown Scottish entrepreneurism.
Maybe K66, as well as being a good idea in its own right, could also trigger a long-delayed outcome which would be transformational for this corner of Scotland.
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