7 October 2004 Edition
Derry/Belfast Dual Carriageway - Maybe by 2025!
BY MITCHEL McLAUGHLIN
The Director of Network Services at the Roads Service has suggested that Derry may get a dual carriageway sometime approaching 2025 and even then it will only go as far as Dungiven, as he claims traffic between Dungiven and Castledawson would not justify the expenditure. Is he suggesting that the numbers of people travelling on to Belfast from Derry daily is drastically less than those making the journey between Derry and Dungiven?
David Corr made this astounding statement at a seminar titled The Road to Economic Growth in Derry's City Hotel this week. If this is an example of the imaginative planning for the regeneration of the economy of the Northwest Region and Derry City as its capital, then it will be more a road to nowhere than a Road to Economic Growth. In the same week that Richard Branson announced plans for tourism into space, we are expected to wait for a decent road between the two main cities of the North until 2025. It looks like we will have a united Ireland before we have a decent road!
The chronic lack of investment in the Northwest's infrastructure by successive governments in both states since partition is intolerable and cannot be endured any longer. Lack of long-term vision has resulted in the continuous haemorrhaging of jobs and failure to attract sustainable inward investment to the Northwest. What is now required is the promised Peace Dividend in the form of an immediate financial injection by the British Government into infrastructural development. This is required to compensate for the wilful neglect and lack of planning which has turned the Northwest into one of the main unemployment blackspots in Western Europe.
The levels of deprivation and unemployment in the North West Region are not an accident of geography. Rather, they are the result of decades of deliberate government centrist policy that focused all investment in the metropolitan areas of Belfast and Dublin. These policies sustained under-investment and under-development in this region. It did not happen by accident, it will require deliberate reversal of this policy and sustained co-operative investment and development by both governments to turn around our economic fortunes.
It is common sense that modern road, air and sea access, combined with communication technological availability, are the essentials that attract today's industries. Therefore, it is obvious that the sequence of events is to develop the infrastructure and you will attract investment and industry, not the other way around. It is past time that the British Government delivered on its commitments and obligations of the much vaunted peace dividend that has yet to materialise.
It is time that the two governments developed an integrated strategy to bring the road, rail, air and sea infrastructure of the entire region in the north west of Ireland into the 21st Century. The notion that the fourth largest city in Ireland should have to wait until 2025 for a dual carriageway that even then will only go as far as Dungiven is ludicrous and unacceptable.
Planners and senior civil servants need to approach the needs of the Northwest with the same 'can do' attitude as they do when addressing infrastructural requirements in the Belfast metropolitan area. The word 'can't' doesn't even enter the equation when Belfast needs investment. A case in point was the use of massive amounts of public funds for the realignment of the road system and the relocation of the Railway Station to facilitate the requirements of Belfast City Airport — a private company. It needed doing — therefore effort or money was no problem.
Instead of depending on the bureaucrats to come up with a plan for our future, perhaps it is time that all of the stakeholders in the Northwest — community, trades union, chambers of commerce, business organisations, traders, educationalists and all politicians take the initiative by negotiating and endorsing a common Economic Regeneration 'Manifesto' or Mission Statement. This would be an effective alternative to 'solo' initiatives or the sometimes fragmented approach which has plagued the discussion to date.