Historians are not surprised when a severe pandemic comes out of the blue, nor should they be surprised when delusional thinking follows in its wake. Plagues have come along regularly throughout human history and the survivors are prone to believe the strangest things and to pursue the most outlandish projects.

After the Black Death, which swept away one-third of Europe’s population in the middle years of the 14th century, conspiracy theories and weird new religious sects emerged. Rulers began to do strange things and to promote crazy schemes for palaces and cathedrals, but the post-plague economy could not afford them and a less ornamented style emerged in all areas of public works.

The extravagant schemes of rulers are in evidence as the COVID-19 pandemic proceeds and two astonishing projects have recently been proposed in Ireland. That they have been entertained at all by serious people is testament to the strangeness of the times.

The first is the Boris Johnson tunnel (formerly a bridge) connecting Scotland to Northern Ireland. There is significant, but not enormous, traffic in goods and people across the north Irish Sea, catered for by ferries and air services.

The two cities that generate most of the traffic, Belfast and Glasgow, are not vast conurbations – both are smaller than Dublin. The cities of London and Paris, the largest in western Europe, are connected through a tunnel which opened in 1994. They have a combined population around 10 times the combined figure for Belfast and Glasgow. The Channel Tunnel cost twice the engineers’ estimate, bankrupted the companies which built it and has never generated benefits to match the costs. It was a political project, intended to copper-fasten Britain’s attachment to continental Europe and the opening day speeches from Queen Elizabeth and the president of France, Francois Mitterand, are a hoot to read in these fraught post-Brexit times.

The taxpayers of Britain and France will be picking up the tab indefinitely for this piece of political vision.

The Northern Ireland to Scotland tunnel started life as a bridge, dreamt up by Boris Johnson whose other brainwaves include detaching Britain from the EU. The tunnel is intended as a consolation prize for NI unionists, consigned to membership in the EU’s single market and forced to endure irritating controls on trade with Britain. The tunnel will make no difference to these, but post-plague political reasoning is not concerned with practical reality. The Boris Burrow has been endorsed by the DUP’s Sammy Wilson, who described the project as “visionary”. More worryingly, helpful endorsements have come from Simon Coveney and Leo Varadkar.

According to the Business Post on Sunday, Alan Dunlop, a professor of architecture, has assured the tunnel’s proponents that the scheme is “technically feasible”. So was the Bertie Bowl. The issue is not technical feasibility. All sorts of bizarre projects would pass this irrelevant test and the best schemes must be identified and consciously chosen. The issue is always costs versus benefits. If a tunnel connecting London and Paris looks like it cost too much to build and operate, a tunnel linking Belfast to Glasgow is a non-runner.

Proposal

A second post-plague proposal featured in The Irish Times on 5 December last, courtesy of that paper’s columnist David McWilliams. This would consist of high-speed railway lines linking, for example, Derry to Cork. They cost from €10m to €100m per kilometre, including stations and rolling stock. There is insufficient passenger traffic between these two small cities to support a single daily flight – both have airports which did not cover their costs even in 2019, before COVID-19 came along.

France and Spain have led Europe in the construction of high-speed rail lines. The Spanish fiscal council, in a recent report, concluded that the benefits for almost all lines did not cover costs. Even the link between Spain’s two biggest cities, Madrid and Barcelona, came out as marginal. In France, the busiest line is the one linking Paris to Lyon. These two cities have a combined population roughly 30 times the population of Cork plus Derry. Every other high-speed line in France looks like it was not worth the money.

Minister for Transport Eamon Ryan has announced his intention to engage consultants for a review of rail expansion plans, including cross-border lines. Whatever about opportunities for rail service improvements within Irish cities, constructing new lines between them, in competition with frequent and inexpensive bus routes, is fanciful in the extreme.

Within cities, any infrastructure project is going to be costly, especially when the first instinct of politicians facing objectors is to retreat underground. Enthusiasts for major transport schemes, especially schemes that have not been costed, are prone to dismiss critics as lacking vision. The critics’ retort: if you are seeing visions, see a doctor.