Ireland may soon be the only country in Europe not to be physically connected to the Continent and to the land masses of Asia and Africa - and perhaps, in the not too distant future, to the Americas, writes Wesley Boyd.
The Channel Tunnel is already in place between Britain and France and Spain and Morocco recently agreed in principle to link themselves with a 24-mile rail tunnel under the Strait of Gibraltar.
And with George W. Bush talking confidently about sending humans to Mars it is no wonder that scientists and engineers are re-examining the 1895 fantasy of Jules Verne that carriages would convey people between Europe and North America under the Atlantic Ocean at a speed of 1600 k.p.h. As well as being a successful author of science fiction, Verne, a stockbroker by trade, was a pragmatist. His fantasies often had a scientific foundation and he forecast with remarkable prescience many technological developments - submarines, space flights, guided missiles, helicopters, even air conditioning. Some engineers believe that modern techniques and materials would make it possible to realise Verne's Atlantic vision by submerging and anchoring a floating tunnel about 25 metres under the surface of the ocean.
There have been a number of proposals over the years to join Ireland and Britain with a tunnel or a bridge. Just two years after Verne's Atlantic forecast, a group of forward-looking businessmen from Belfast went to London to try to persuade the government of the day to put up £15,000 towards the cost of carrying out borings and soundings in the North Channel to see if a tunnel between Ireland and Scotland was viable. The government did not take the bait.
Sixty years later I was in the press gallery of the House of Commons at Westminster when other Ulstermen attempted to get the British Government to take an interest in the project. Montgomery Hyde, Unionist MP for North Belfast, moved a motion calling for a tunnel to be constructed between Co Antrim and the Scottish coast. He spent 40 minutes outlining its advantages. Echoing Jules Verne, he pronounced, "The dreams of yesterday are the realities of today".
The other members who contributed to the debate did not share the seriousness of his intent, however.
His Unionist colleague Alan McKibbin, of East Belfast, said in the event of hydrogen bombs being dropped on the United Kingdom the people of Ulster and Scotland could shelter in the tunnel. The population of England and Wales would be wiped out, but McKibbin took consolation that "the superior strain" would emerge to build a brave new world.
The Dublin-born Conservative MP for Brighton, William Teeling, saw the tunnel as a means of drawing Northern Ireland and the Republic closer together, leading to the end of partition. The Labour MP for Thurrock, Hugh Delargy, who came from the Glens of Antrim, denounced the Stormont Government for being bigoted and discriminatory and said if a tunnel was going to be dug it should be under the River Thames.
Another Labour member, Edward Mallalieu, was a bit more far-sighted. He wanted tunnels built not only under the North Channel but also between Britain and France and Spain and Africa so that Mr Hyde could walk from Belfast to Capetown if he so desired.
His colleague, Ernest Davies, remarked that Hyde had as much chance of travelling underground from Belfast as he had of flying to Mars in a space ship. A junior minister, Hugh Molson, assured Mr Hyde that the government would keep his motion in mind. And since that debate in 1957 the motion remains in a Whitehall pigeonhole labelled "under consideration".
There is a similar pigeonhole in Government Buildings in Dublin. It contains proposals from a leading British engineering firm, Symonds, for a rail tunnel from Dublin to Holyhead. The ambitious project was submitted to the Government in 1997 and proposed the construction of a 56-mile tunnel - the longest in the world - under the Irish Sea. Instead of boring under the sea-bed, Symonds envisaged building the tunnel in sections on dry land. Each section, weighing about 50,000 tonnes, would be towed out to sea and submerged. The completed tunnel would have twin rail tracks and shuttle trains would carry cars and lorries between the two ports. The estimated cost of construction in 1997 was £14 billion sterling, to be shared by the British and Irish Governments, the European Union and private investors.
For a start Symonds asked the Government to subscribe £10 million to enable a feasibility study to be carried out. Bureaucracy immediately set in. The then Minister for Public Enterprise, Mrs Mary O'Rourke, referred the proposals to a technical steering committee, which in turn referred them to outside consultants. The consultants consulted and, no doubt mindful of the huge cost overruns for the English Channel Tunnel, opined that considerable uncertainty should be attached to Symonds' figures, which were only rough estimates.
They concluded the Irish Sea tunnel was unlikely to generate enough revenue to recover its costs in the foreseeable future and recommended that Mrs O'Rourke should not offer financial assistance for a feasibility study. The project was sent to its pigeonhole, where it rests undisturbed.
So Ireland remains a sacred island untainted by physical attachment to another land mass. How long can we keep our Hy Brasil floating alone in its Atlantic solitude?