Ben Lowry: If Stormont took hard decisions Northern Ireland could have had better airport provision and road links

But this column, in a more optimistic new year note, is about how a more realistic approach to funding could reap benefits.

It is about two aspects of infrastructure that I have written about before. Both have a cross-border element – one an instance in which there could be cross-border competition, the other in which cross-border planning commands widespread support: airport provision, and road links.

Dublin Airport is set to have its busiest ever year, and surpass even the 33 million passengers it had in 2019, before Covid. That year it was third busies airport in the UK and Ireland, behind London Gatwick but busier even than Manchester, which is very busy.

In 2019, Dublin had five times more passengers then Belfast International.

Why? Well a number of reasons, a key one being that it has critical mass. The bigger it gets, the more destinations it has, and the more people use it. When I was a student 30 years ago the best way to fly from Belfast to, say, Los Angeles was via London Heathrow, because you would have a short flight to London and then various airlines who flew non-stop to LA. Now Dublin has direct flights to both San Francisco and LA and so it is far easier to drive down the motorway from Belfast and fly from the Irish capital than spend four hours in transit via Heathrow.

Dublin has only one passenger airport that easily serves people who live 100 miles from it in every direction, thanks to Ireland’s motorway network. Northern Ireland, on the other hand, with less than half of the population of the Republic, has three airports.

Not only does this absurdity go without debate in local politics, there is cross-party agreement to sustain the three airport system. When City of Derry gets into trouble, it always gets a taxpayer bailout. In 2016 Stormont gave it £7 million. Last year another the then infrastructure minister Nichola Mallon gave it another £3m.

Could you imagine if a minister said: this is not a sensible use of money? There would be an outcry about ‘discrimination’. But last year the airport had a trifling 163,000 people pass through it. This year it has poor numbers too.

For years I have written that NI needs one airport that can compete with Dublin. If Belfast International, Belfast City and City of Derry combined their passenger numbers we could have an airport with at least 10 million passengers. The airport would become more attractive to use, with more destinations, pulling back some of the people that use Dublin. Aldergove might rise to 12 million and Dublin might fall back to 30 million, so it would not match the latter, but it is a perfectly located in the middle of Ulster to be a hub that could for European and transatlantic flights.

When I make this point people complain about Belfast International, as if I am lobbying for the airport. But I am not – in most respects I find Belfast City more pleasant and convenient to use. My point is not about the airport as it currently operates, but the location. I would accept the loss of convenience if it meant one outstanding NI airport. As I think people in Londonderry would do. Such a hub airport would be big enough to justify a motorway coming in from three directions: Belfast, the northwest and Lisburn/Moira. It would also be big enough to justify a rail link.

Such an airport plan would only happen with political boldness, which Stormont has not yet shown.

Which brings me to my second example of cross-border infrastructure: the Belfast-Dublin road.

There is now no money to close the gaps on the A1 road, which means that the northern side of the route is poor compared to the southern side. Yet in the 1970s the NI section was far better than the useless single carriageway sections in the Republic.

Ireland got a lot of EU money for its motorways but it also accepted tolls, which has helped fund them. Tolls are something that, again, I have not heard Stormont even discuss.

Twenty years ago I interviewed an AA official who said that they were not particularly keen on tolls but if it was a choice between a motorway now with tolls or having no motorway for 20 years, the AA would back the former.

This year major stretches of dual carriageway on the Belfast to Londonderry route were finally completed, toll free. If NI politicians had accepted a modest toll we might have had a motorway to the Northwest decades ago, and likewise between Hillsborough and the border. And the money saved could have been spent on other projects such as the A5 dual carriageway.