What would our infrastructure look like if we had stayed in the UK?

Guildenstern

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120483873#Comment_120483873

Agree with the privatisation over the last 20 years or so. And not exclusively the Tories either but they have continued with it. When last I checked even many natural conservative voters would prefer to see a re-nationalisation of transport, and that's saying something.

That said, it's probably more accurate to compare is with Scotland, similar population figures. Denmark as well, although it can get very difficult making these comparisons.

end of the road

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120484014#Comment_120484014

it's actually a good thing ireland has no local authority system like the UK.

not only is ireland a small country and does not need multiple layers of government and the associated expense like council tax etc, but we do not need the disaster of such councils being used as a way to make cuts to services to get central government off the hook.

that's exactly how the UK local authority system works and it's an abomination, and not to mention that it's a gravey train for some also.

any services that may be a bit better in the uk at the moment won't be so for long unless the nasty party are kicked out soon.

bk

I’d point out that many social services and payments are actually higher and better here than in the UK. The state pension is higher in Ireland than the UK and unemployment payments are over double what they are in the UK. Only €94 a week in the UK, versus €220 here!

The NHS is really the only area that the UK offers better than us. Though it seems to be deteriorating quickly, while ours is gradually improving (Free GP gradually being rolled out, etc.).

Peregrinus

Yeah. It's absurd to think that if Ireland had remained in the UK it would have had similar infrastructure development to much more densely-populated England. It certainly would not.

Kaybaykwah

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120483579#Comment_120483579

Another corollary of the airline industry that the Irish have successfully developed is the duty free and other shops in Russian airports when the Iron Curtain fell. That expertise has also helped it make inroads in other markets worldwide.

I also think it was worth the wait for Ireland to get the motorways that it has Today. They are really state of the art and on average, smartly insulated from residential areas throughout the country.

dublincc2

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120486241#Comment_120486241

I would disagree on motorways. Most of them are not justified by t he levels of traffic that use them and the routes are very insufficent, just look at the M7/M8 situation and how it could have been more sustainable to build a spur to Limerick on the Dublin-Cork motorway. Don't get me started on ridiculous and pointless wastes such as the M2 or M3 which should've just been DC bypasses around individual towns instead of a full blown motorway that isn't used that often and say over-spec, not to mention the heritage destruction of the M3.

marno21

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120487392#Comment_120487392

These roads are not "full blown motorways". A handful of "full blown motorways" were built in Ireland, namely the M1, the M7 to Portlaoise, the M4 to Kinnegad, the M50, short stretches of the M11 and a few isolated stretches around the country. The rest of the motorway network is a lower class dual carriageway with much narrower central medians, narrower lanes and hard shoulders, lower spec junctions and as a result less land take. Many of them actually opened as N road dual carriageways, but were later reclassified as motorways (motorway being a legal classification rather than a road standard in this country) to protect them from unauthorised development and make them safer.

This argument rears its head whenever a new road under motorway regulations is proposed to be built (the M20, M28, M21 etc). "Don't build a motorway build a dual carriageway instead". Little do they know that the difference between the two for all those motorways proposed would simply be the colour of the signs on the finished road.

veryangryman

I really hope we build more motorways. Anyone who wishes we had less, i have to question the sanity of. Why have a 5 star life when you can have 2-star

dublincc2

Is it fair to say that under the UK the routing motorway to Limerick/Cork from Dublin would be different?

AnFearCeart

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120490113#Comment_120490113

True that. But most of these yellow pack motorways are perfect for purpose and quite an enjoyable drive.

bk

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120493370#Comment_120493370

No, it is fair to say that there would probably be no motorway to either Cork or Limerick. Source, just look at Northern Ireland.

marno21

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120493667#Comment_120493667

100%. They are absolutely perfect for their use and are incredibly safe and do their job excellently (the odd junction being the exception).

Peregrinus

In terms of infrastructure development in Ireland-within-the-UK, it should be born in mind that IWUK would likely be notably poorer than real-world Ireland, since we wouldn't have been free to pursue the economic policies that have served us so well over the past 60 or 70 years. (In speculating how IWUK would fare economically we have a useful real-world control: Northern Ireland.)

So, infrastructural development would have been dependent to a material extent on financial transfers from GB. Which would certainly have happened to some extent, but I suspect not to such an extent as would replicate what real-world independent Ireland has been able to finance.

At the risk of oversimplifying, probably the financing of infrastructure in IWUK would have been better during the first fifty years of independence, and worse in the second 50 years. So we might have had some advantage in the kinds of infrastructure that the UK government was financing in the period 1920-1970. But for much of that period the UK government wasn't financing a lot of infrastructure even in GB — they don't talk about "interwar stagnation" for nothing — and most of what they did finance would be now be in need of replacement, if not already replaced.

AnFearCeart

There are a few things to consider, especially with consideration to population numbers. While a decent amount of Irish men fought WW1 within the British Army, had we remained in the UK would similar or bigger Irish numbers have fought WW2? What kind of effect would this have had on our population numbers post WW2 which were already dropping towards 3m and even dropped to 2.8m in 1961. Would there be less Irish people heading into the 1960s owing to men killed in WW2? Or would our emigration levels to rebuild bombed England not have happened with said men and women staying in Ireland to rebuild here? Also, would immigration into Ireland have happened from UK colonies?

If IWUK (robbing that abbreviation used above!) being in WW2 how many of our towns and cities would have been bombed? Dublin, Wexford, Waterford and Cork most certainly would have been bombed by the Germans. Would Dublin have got an underground in the post-WW2 era as part of the rebuild? Cork probably not owing to the terrain and soils there.

Would a IWUK have seen much larger exploration for gas and oil off our coasts in the post WW2 era? Surely the British would have pushed for greater exploration, especially in the Celtic sea and possibly more of the Irish sea too. Would Waterford or Cork today be a centre for landing oil and gas to feed Ireland and GB.

As for the roads system, would our network today more closely resemble the old Trunk and Links system that existed before the more modern N, R and L (Local) system we have today? The motorway network would surely have been built more as a bypass to bypass system of towns and villages along T and L routes. Our modern day M8 (T6) would probably be motorway to Kilkenny and then DC for much of the rest of the way down to Cork. I think modern day M1 and M11 would exist with motorway the whole spine of the east coast.

bk

Couple of points to keep in mind about Dublin getting a Metro if we were still in the UK. 1922 was 60 years after the opening of the first London Underground line and by 1922 there were 9 lines open in London and yet despite Dublin being the second city of the UK, there wasn’t even a plan or real suggestion of Dublin getting even one line.

Also worth noting that in London, while the Bakerloo and Piccadilly were opened in 1906, the next London Underground line, the Victoria line, didn’t open until 1968. This really shows what bad economic state Britain was in from the start of WW1 until well after WW2. If they weren’t building new lines during this period in London, they certainly weren’t going to be doing any in Dublin.

Lewis_Benson

Oh I'd say we would have been driving about in gold carriages and living in palaces

swampgas

We would most likely still be using miles instead of kilometers. Other than that, I would hesitate to hazard a guess!

AAAAAAAAA

I actually think that the motorways in Dublin would have been much more developed, like in Belfast. That's not really a good thing though in my eyes. The rest of the country probably wouldn't see great investment, certainly there would be no M11, M2, maybe not even an M4/M6. One very good spine running from Belfast to Cork right through the middle of Dublin would probably be the bulk of the motorway network.

Maybe the Jack Lynch and Limerick Tunnels would have been bridges, they do love their bridges.

Sam Russell

Remember, if we were still part of the UK, there would be no Stormont.

That would mean that the Stormont decisions to build motorways that did not go to Dublin would not have happened. The closure of the train service to nationalist areas, but keeping those to Unionist areas would have happened differently. As would most infrastructure questions for that part of Ireland - in particular Donegal and Derry.

How quiet would be those that favoured an independence agenda? Would they influence the provision of infrastructure (plus other matters)?

PolmacD

Dublin might be a bit cleaner, have less clutter/crappy road signs and bollards and have an overall nicer public realm like most big cities in the UK.

PolmacD

And we’d have taller buildings

Sam Russell

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120517281#Comment_120517281

We did have but we demolished them.

Anyone remember the Ballymun towers?

andrewfaulk

Haven't seen it mentioned on here yet, but likely that Cork would have had a major role as a Royal Navy base in WW2 hosting Western Approaches escort forces(similar to its role in WW1). This likely would have made it a target for the Luftwaffe during 1940-1941..

PolmacD

I’m thinking more about high rise office buildings in city centres. UK cities aren’t afraid to build up and make best use of prime city centre land.

gjim

I think we dodged a major bullet in that regard. Where we did ape the UK to “make best use of prime city centre land” we got the likes of Hawkins house and Apollo house. Outside of London, the post war tall building boom in UK cities has been an unmitigated disaster to my eye. I worked for a few months in such a tall building in a provincial UK city and it was horrible.

PolmacD

We absolutely (and thankfully) dodged the post war brutalist bullet here in Ireland. I do think we are now lagging behind the likes of Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds which have all seen the development of more modern and not unpleasant high rise developments in recent years. Dublin’s skyline remains stumpy.

Peregrinus

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120512059#Comment_120512059

There might well be Stormont.

It's a historical speculation so you can write it how you like, but the Government of Ireland Act 1920 provided for home rule within the UK, with separate parliaments and governments in Dublin (for 26 counties) and Belfast (for 6 counties). Because SF boycotted the Southern Ireland parliament and government they never functioned. But if they had functioned, we might very well have ended up with Ireland within the UK, but with separate Dublin and Belfast administrations.

Sam Russell

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120521612#Comment_120521612

The 1914 Home Rule bill was passed and binned when the military mutinied at the Curragh Camp in response, and Ulster Covenant of 1912 had already threatened armed rebellion.

I think that independence was already underway by 1914. The Government of Ireland Act of 1920 was just another attempt at stopping the inevitable.

When do you start the lookback for Ireland being remaining in the UK? For some, we never left.

dublincc2

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120521959#Comment_120521959

At the very least partition was inevitable if Home Rule was introduced after the war. Whether or not it would have remained that way in the following decades is uncertain. Realistically 1916 and the 1918 conscription crisis was what our the nail in the coffin, for the South there really wasn't any going back after that.

Thank God we're surrounded by water.