Why was the railway in NI not privatised?

sitstill

This is just a thought that came into my head on Wednesday when there was no public transport in Northern Ireland due to the strikes.

In the rest of the UK the railways were privatised in the 1990s. Why was there an exception for NI?

n97 mini

A lot of things are different in NI. Some due to local sensitivities, but other are due to the fact that NI, because of its history, gets cosseted.

About two thirds of the budget in NI is subvention from the rest of the UK, and they have a very large proportion of civil servants, by all accounts to keep people in jobs and try to normalise society as much as possible.

I would think that NIR are somewhat similar: more important to keep people in jobs that to run an efficient service.

Added to that, it's entirely possible that when the rest of the UK system was being privatised that no operator wanted to have anything to do with a pre-peace process basket case.

Losty Dublin

There is a few that spring to mind.

• The lines in the North needed massive investment, including the complete re signaling and relaying of all their lines, new rolling stock and construction of the Dargan Bridge and this was something Westminster knew would scare off any bidders, hence their reluctance.
• The Londonderry/Portrush line and Larne were also candidates for closure for a long time and as such weren't considered for same.
• NIR was tied up into the operation of buses as well with it's sister, Ulsterbus. If it was to be sold, the bus network had to go with it at the same time and would require a lot of enforcement to see that connections etc were kept.
• The economies of scale along with other services meant that a lot of very small companies would be bidding for PW, signaling, station operators, rolling stock ownership and servicing, as well as operating the services themselves. This made it far less viable than the mainland UK as it only took one unwon franchise to cripple the whole process.
• Also, the arrangement with Irish Rail on cross border and freight services at the time wouldn't have sat pretty with the franchise bidding systems the UK used, given that a franchisee would be bidding for sole rights on a service. In the UK, freight was a big earner; NIR had very little of same to offer and what was there was almost all operated by Irish Rail on behalf of their own clients.
• The Troubles also made it a less favourable proposition to ask after, as indeed was the case for most of their businesses in the North.
• Lastly and crucially, the ownership and laws governing NIR over the years came in mainly from the Northern Irish Parliament Office so they would have needed a new act of Parliament to be drawn up separate from the main UK act as well as complementing the many merger acts before it that still had legal merit, such as those relating to the GNRB, CIE etc.

While it was not impossible, it made the whole operation a lot more complex and made for a messy sale, something that even today doesn't appear likely.

Richard

I think that the big reason was that British Rail was privatised, and that NIR was never part of British Rail.

Also some other controversial policies weren't introduced there such as water privatisation and the Poll Tax.

seanmacc

So it could be ready for The National Re-unification of Ireland and CIE and IE could just move straight in there and bring in some of their legendary Dublin efficiency.

icdg

Richard wrote: »

I think that the big reason was that British Rail was privatised, and that NIR was never part of British Rail.

That's essentially correct. The privatization was not a "privatization of the United Kingdom's railways", it was a privatization of British Rail specifically.

You also have to remember that the UK Department of Transport was managing the privatization, but Northern Ireland Railways was and is not part of that departments remit save and expect for those matters which are dealt with at European Union level (because, obviously, only one UK minister can be at the Council of Transport Ministers). In those days the NI Department of the Environment, which was at the time run by a Minister of State at the Northern Ireland Office, was NITHCo's parent department, the Department for Regional Development is now in the post-Good Friday Agreement landscape.

The railways in Northern Ireland, post-1922, were and are under completely different legislation from that in the rest of the UK, the Railways Act 1993 does not and was never intended to extend to Northern Ireland.

n97 mini

seanmacc wrote: »

So it could be ready for The National Re-unification of Ireland and CIE and IE could just move straight in there and bring in some of their legendary Dublin efficiency.

LOL!