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

I've said it before, but I'll say it again. We need to stop looking to the UK and London for inspiration on infrastructure and public transport and instead look to similar sized mainland European countries and cities, like Copenhagen and Amsterdam.

The UK for the most part is WAY behind mainland Europe and in general is itself looking to them for inspiration.

murphaph is probably correct about the North West rail network, but that is literally the only positive I can think of, everything else would be negative IMO.

All you have to do is look at Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Northern England to see how badly we would fair.

Our nice intercity motorway network probably wouldn't exist, just look North of the border. Port Tunnel, Jack Lynch tunnel, I doubt it.

Would Dublin even have Luas? many similar sized cities in the UK don't have any light rail or Metros.

Under Beeching, I suspect even more of the rail lines would have been closed, then IR did. And I certainly can't see British Rail reopening the WRC (perhaps for the better!) and I certainly don't think we would have wanted to go through the privatisation of British Rail or the very high price of rail tickets!

I certainly don't think Knock airport would exist! Can you imagine that conversation in London!! I'd question some of the other regional airports too. Shannon probably wouldn't have been the success it was (with Duty Free and Free economic zone), it would probably exist as a military base and not much else.

And that leads us to the biggest issue, World War 2

We would have been dragged into WW2. Dublin would have likely gotten blitzed like Belfast was. Almost 60,000 homes were destroyed in Belfast, can you imagine that in Dublin. And it could have been worse, it was found that the Germans actually stopped bombing Belfast after complaints from De Valera, as they were worried about Irish American's response and the potential to drag US into the war (at that time). But had we been a part of the UK, there would have been no such concerns and they would have had a free hand to bomb Dublin, Cork and continue on Belfast.

Then you would have hundreds of thousands of Irish men conscripted into the British Army.

A lot of the nice ideas that the British had in the 1920's fell by the wayside or were reversed before and after WW2 throughout Britain, simply because Britain was broke from the war.

While 1950's Ireland was far from fun, I suspect it would have been much worse had tens of thousands of homes in Dublin were destroyed and potentially hundreds of thousands of dead Irish men from the war. I suspect Dublin would have been at the end of the list for rebuilding.

And then what if we had "The Troubles" of the 1970's but all over Ireland!

I really don't see how anything would have been better. You can't really separate infrastructure development from the political and economic realities of the time.

A few more points. The British government seemed to show very little interest in developing the infrastructure of Ireland.

• Dublin was the largest slum in Europe in the early 1900's, before the war of independence under British rule and they showed very little interest in doing anything about it. It was the Free State that went on a massive house building initiative to help clear the slums and house the people. Now for those of us interested in infrastructure, in retrospect mistakes were made in this process around urban planning, but at least most people living in the slums were rehoused in vastly superior conditions. One of the major architects involved in this effort commented that they were trying to do in one generation, what should have been happening over the past 5 generations!
• The roads were in a terrible state of repair, almost no roads were tarmaced in Ireland before the war! In 1925 the state started a massive road maintenance project, repairing and tarmacing most of the roads in the country and once done even started widening and improving them. It was a massive project for the time, as big, if not bigger then the Motorway projects of the 2000's.
• After independence the state really tried to keep the rail network going. Many people here complain about what Irish Rail did to the rail network, but frankly what the British did was much worse. And frankly what they did in Ulster was atrocious. They basically destroyed almost the entire network up there, even successful lines! It was WW2 that really did in the rail network here. We couldn't get cheap coal from the UK and thus could barely keep any trains running during the war years. In fairness to IR, I think they tried very hard to peer the network back to a reasonable core network and with as little money as they had, invested and developed that network well with Diesel trains, better reliability, etc.

Personally I feel that the main reason why Ireland and Dublin are so far behind other similar sized European countries and cities, is because of a horrifying lack of investment in the infrastructure of Ireland during British rule, which put us decades in not a century behind those other countries. We have such a large infrastructure deficit, that it is hard to catch up with where we should be.

After all, unlike most other European countries, for the most part, the industrial revolution bypassed Ireland as the British saw no reason to invest in that here outside of Belfast, as they saw Ireland as nothing but their breadbasket.

It is only once we got independence, did you see real efforts to develop and improve things. Of course for the first few decades we were broke, but at least efforts like the above (and electrification) were being made. Then we joined the EU and things started to really improve with the influx of cash.

BTW As an aside, under British rule, I'd see no way would they allow something like the Shannon free trade zone to be created or allow our low corporate tax rate and other business friendly moves.

"We are currently rolling out broadband (well, supposed to be), which is not bad. Not sure how the UK or EU member states compare. We must wait till it is complete here before we will know."

I can speak on this one. We are doing far better then the UK, 60% of Irish homes are now passed by Fibre, versus 26% in the UK.

Compared to mainland Europe, it is a mixed bag, we are probably about average. Germany is low like the UK, France is slightly ahead of us, but then of course there are countries like Spain and the Nordics who are over 80% and some have had FTTH for decades.

There is pretty intense competition here now between Eir, Siro and VM all rolling out fibre networks and the NBI in rural areas (though lagging).

In terms of mobile, we are also doing very well, pretty good 4G coverage, quickly rolling out 5G and perhaps most importantly strong competition and low prices.

In terms of TV broadcasting, I think we wouldn't have as strong services as RTE and TG4. Sure, the UK has regional channels like UTV and S4C, but I think they are much weaker and don't have the independence that RTE/TG4 enjoy. Of course we have the same pay TV services, mostly Sky and VM and anyone can stick up a dish to get Freesat. I suppose the only negative I can think of in this area is that Freeview is a better service then Saorview in terms of number and variety of channels.

Perhaps a more interesting question would be, what would our infrastructure be like if we had gained independence in 1800 or earlier?

Think about it, we would most likely avoided the worst of the potato famine. Keep in mind, the potato blight struck across Europe, but it only had such a terrible impact on Ireland, because of the control of the land by British landlords. Ireland at the time was producing more then enough food of other types to feed everyone in the country. 4,000 ships full of grain left Ireland in 1847 at the height of the famine!

So if we had avoided the "famine" and the Irish population grew at the same rate as the UK, then our population would be over 30 million people today!

Think about that, Ireland could have started to industrialise, compete with Britain and enjoyed the fruits of industrialisation, rather then being held back.

Even if our population was even half that, imagine the positive impact that would have had on our railways. Far more lines would likely have survived to today and would be much busier. Hell with that sort of population, likely mostly centred around heavily industrialised cities of Dublin, Cork and Belfast, you could even possibly justify true high speed rail from Cork to Belfast.

After all, a lot of the infrastructure deficit we have today is due to the lack of investment in infrastructure under British rule, the industrial revolution bypassing the country, a population that is much smaller then it should be, a very rural and dispersed population.

Basically Ireland has suffered badly from extremely stunted growth opportunities that other countries had. In the 1800's other European countries were industrialising and urbanising, while we weren't allowed to be anything but an extremely underdeveloped agricultural society.