Ben Lowry: Contradictory Stormont MLAs are to blame for the farce of the thwarted A5 road upgrade

(Click here to read Ben Lowry on the busier Belfast city centre)

Before I joined the News Letter I wrote extensively about the farcical Belfast to Dublin A1/N1 road, which until well into this century was a single carriageway in parts, so that fast intercity traffic got caught behind tractors.

On these pages I have called for a single airport for Northern Ireland at Aldergrove, something in which I still believe – although not as any reward for the current Belfast International Airport, but rather because it is well located to be a smaller hub airport to rival Dublin. I would be sad to see the closure of Belfast City, the airport I most use, but would accept that as the price to pay (along with the closure of Derry City Airport) for a proper airport in the centre of NI. Such a hub might then have enough critical mass to justify reopening the rail line near Aldergrove, and to justify dual carriageway spurs to Templepatrick and Moira.

But Stormont has never even come close to such thinking on infrastructure. It wants all things to all men. And no-one to pay for anything, ever.

The assembly’s hopelessly muddled approach to infrastructure, and to other major matters of public policy, is apparent in the farce around the A5. As we have reported, all the major Stormont parties voted for the completely unrealistic net zero goals in 2022, almost heedless of the huge consequences, now including the A5 upgrade being halted by a court.

Even the then chair of the Climate Change Commission, Lord Debden, used diplomatic language to imply that MLAs were foolish. He said that the assembly had gone well beyond commission net zero recommendations. He politely praised the ambition of the goal, but pointed out that the province was already trying to catch-up with the rest of the UK in achieving a clean environment. “These new targets will quickly lose credibility if the policy focus does not shift quickly to implementation and successful delivery of outcomes,” he said.

Northern Ireland does not have the same level of environmental protection as in Great Britain, yet Stormont was breezily passing ridiculous, but distant, goals.

These policy contradictions emerge again and again in local politics.

• We want national parks, but slack house planning rules that is not allowed in such protected spaces in the rest of the UK

There is rural and political hostility to wind mills until massively excessive subsidies are secured for them, and now they are cropping up everywhere

• We want motorways or top notch dual carriageways, but have not even considered the sort of tolling that has helped construct such roads in places like France

• We want to be able to use our cars everywhere but also to have swingeing climate targets

• We want to slash carbon emissions but will not even countenance the one totally clean form of energy in that respect, nuclear (and then we believe exaggerated nonsense about waste from such clean nuclear power in Great Britain, such as at Sellafield)

As it happens, I think the court case on the A5 showed the over mighty approach of the courts across the UK, in which they often effectively dictate policy over elected politicians. This problem is particularly pronounced in Northern Ireland (as per the activist role of the Belfast courts on legacy matters).

But even if that is true of the courts, in this case it is the politicians who set binding targets on net zero, so it is Stormont that could have avoided this farce.

For years I have begun to fear for the very future of the western world. We have become such wealthy and spoilt societies that we demand all sorts of contradictory outcomes as those cited above.

We want to have lavish, and ruinously expensive welfare systems but not more taxes to fund it. We want hospitals on every corner, but won’t properly reflect on how such over-stretch is at the heart of the chaos in the NHS. Still the BBC breathlessly reports on the symptoms of this chaos rather than the political and public source of it.

We want tough prison sentences but recoil from building new jails. We want swathes of the working age population to be able to turn up their nose at certain jobs, then we want an end to the immigration that becomes necessary for that.

And we want both glorious roads and the sort of environmental targets that prohibit them.

Ben Lowry (@Benlowry2) is News Letter editor