12 May 2026

TITLE: Minister Kimmins Is Coming to Strangford. Here Are the Answers to Her Questions.

Strangford Lough Crossing Campaign | 12 May 2026

Minister for Infrastructure Liz Kimmins MLA confirmed in the Northern Ireland Assembly on Monday 11 May 2026 that she has agreed to visit Strangford this week, at the invitation of a local elected representative. The campaign warmly welcomes that visit.

But the Minister’s visit will be more productive if she arrives with accurate information rather than the figures her Department has been supplying. On 11 May 2026, she made five substantive statements about the Strangford crossing. Every one of them deserves a direct, evidenced answer before she steps off the ferry. This post provides those answers.

The verbatim record is taken from the Northern Ireland Assembly Official Report, 11 May 2026, AQO 3527/22-27.

The Minister said: the 2013 Strategic Review concluded that a fixed crossing could not be justified on value-for-money grounds.

That is an accurate description of what the 2013 review concluded. The campaign does not dispute it.

What the campaign disputes is whether that conclusion is still sound in 2026. The 2013 review is thirteen years old. It did not model induced demand — the additional traffic a fixed crossing generates that does not currently use the ferry. Every comparable study in the United Kingdom and Ireland, including the HITRANS Corran Narrows Fixed Link Feasibility Study (Stantec UK and COWI, 2020), treats induced demand as the decisive variable in crossing appraisal. Excluding it is not a conservative approach; it is a methodological gap that makes the 2013 conclusion unreliable as a current policy basis.

The 2013 review was also not conducted under DfI’s own current Transport Appraisal Guidance framework, which requires multi-criteria appraisal across economy, environment, safety, accessibility and integration. It was a departmental review, produced internally, never independently tested.

There is nothing unusual or embarrassing about a government department revisiting a thirteen-year-old assessment. It is what good government requires. The Cleddau Bridge in Pembrokeshire replaced a ferry in 1975 after earlier assessments had concluded the route was insufficiently trafficked to justify a fixed crossing. Traffic grew more than twenty-fold in 49 years. The vessel which once operated at Strangford came from that same Welsh crossing. The Department was wrong then. A feasibility study is how you find out whether it is wrong now.

The Minister said: more recent, high-level estimates suggest a bridge could cost in excess of £500 million.

This figure requires direct examination, because it has been published on the record of the Northern Ireland Assembly and the public is entitled to know where it comes from.

The figure originates in an internal departmental memorandum disclosed under Freedom of Information reference DFI-2024-0412, drafted by Mark McPeak, Divisional Roads Manager (Southern Division), on 7 August 2024. The document was a background note to assist with a correspondence response, not a professional engineering assessment.

The calculation runs as follows. Mr McPeak took the Narrow Water Bridge tender price of approximately EUR 102 million (recorded as approximately £96 million including a 10% construction cost increase), divided it by the 190-metre project construction length, and derived a unit rate of £0.5 million per metre. He then applied that unit rate to a 650-metre crossing distance, reaching £325 million. He then added what he described in his own words as “guesstimate” uplifts: 40% for water surges and access difficulties (£130 million), £40 million for approach roads, and £50 million for scheme development and design, reaching £545 million. A further 20% optimism bias produced a final figure of £654 million, rounded to £650 million. The £500 million figure the Minister cited in the Assembly on 11 May 2026 is a floor restatement of the same calculation, without the OB.

The author’s use of the word “guesstimate” is not the campaign’s characterisation. It is in the document itself.

The fundamental problem with the calculation is the assumption that the Narrow Water Bridge unit cost scales linearly to Strangford. The Narrow Water Bridge is a 160-metre span over a sheltered, relatively shallow river channel. The Strangford crossing at the narrows involves a channel approximately 60 metres deep, with the strongest tidal flow of any inlet in the British Isles. These are not comparable engineering environments. Linear unit-rate scaling between them has no engineering basis.

For comparison: the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Bridge at New Ross crosses the River Barrow with an 887-metre span and 36 metres of navigational clearance. It was built by BAM Ireland — the same contractor now building the Narrow Water Bridge — and opened in 2020. Its cost, inflation-adjusted to October 2025, is approximately £119,500 per metre. Applied to a 650-metre Strangford structure, that yields approximately £78 million for the bridge deck before any site-specific uplifts. Even with substantial additions for the deeper channel and tidal conditions, a professionally derived figure would differ very materially from £650 million.

The campaign is not asserting that the bridge will cost £78 million, or any other specific figure. The campaign is asserting that the Department’s figure is not reliable, that it was described by its own author as a guesstimate, and that the purpose of a feasibility study is precisely to produce a credible, independently verified cost estimate. Refusing to commission that study on the basis of an unverified internal guesstimate is reasoning that cannot withstand scrutiny.

The Minister said: the crossing does not form part of the regional strategic transport network and would be considered through the Eastern Transport Plan.

The campaign accepts that the Eastern Transport Plan 2035 is the relevant local transport planning vehicle so far as Ards and North Down is concerned. However, there is a structural problem with routing the entire question through that plan.

The Eastern Transport Plan covers five council areas: Belfast City, Antrim and Newtownabbey, Ards and North Down, Mid and East Antrim, and Lisburn and Castlereagh. Newry, Mourne and Down District Council — the western shore authority for the Strangford crossing — falls outside the Eastern Transport Plan entirely. It sits under a separate sub-regional planning framework.

DfI’s own formal refusal letter (TOF-0467-2025, Ian McClung, Head of Consultancy Services, 24 October 2025) directed the campaign towards the Eastern Transport Plan as the mechanism for consideration of a permanent crossing — while simultaneously acknowledging that both Ards and North Down and Newry, Mourne and Down are relevant councils. The Department directed a two-council project into a one-council planning framework. That is a contradiction the Department created and has not resolved.

Beyond the structural problem, the Eastern Transport Plan is not a feasibility study. It is a strategic planning document that identifies priorities. Even if the Strangford crossing is referenced within the plan, that reference would itself require a TAG-compliant feasibility study before any project could advance. The Minister is proposing to use a planning document as a substitute for the professional assessment that the planning document would itself require.

Both Ards and North Down Borough Council and Newry, Mourne and Down District Council have passed formal resolutions supporting an independent feasibility study. The bi-council mandate is complete. The Department now needs to act on it.

The Minister said: Strangford Lough is subject to significant environmental protections, which would present additional challenges.

The campaign agrees entirely. Strangford Lough is a Special Area of Conservation, an Area of Special Scientific Interest, and a Ramsar site. Environmental assessment for any fixed crossing would be rigorous, and rightly so.

The point that needs to be made plainly is this: the existence of environmental protections is an argument for commissioning a proper environmental assessment, not against it. A TAG-compliant feasibility study includes environmental appraisal as a mandatory component. Without it, nobody — not the Department, not the campaign, not the Minister — knows whether an environmentally acceptable design and alignment is achievable. The Department’s current position is to cite environmental complexity as a reason not to find out.

The HITRANS Corran Narrows Fixed Link Feasibility Study (Stantec UK and COWI, 2020) was conducted across a Scottish sea loch with equivalent marine environmental sensitivity, within a National Scenic Area. Environmental constraints were identified, mapped, and modelled as part of the study. They were not used as a reason to decline the study.

The Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Bridge crosses the River Barrow, a sensitive estuarine environment, and received all necessary consents. The Narrow Water Bridge, currently under construction, crosses the River Newry at a location subject to environmental designations and obtained all necessary approvals.

Environmental sensitivity is real. The answer to it is proper environmental assessment. A feasibility study is that assessment.

The Minister said, in response to Mr O’Toole’s direct question about whether she supports a feasibility study: “we need to get more information and then decide where we go next.”

The campaign respectfully submits that the Minister has answered her own question.

Getting more information is what a feasibility study does. Deciding where to go next is what happens after a feasibility study reports. The Minister has described, in her own words, the instrument this campaign has been requesting for two years. She has not yet used the words. That is the remaining step.

The feasibility study is estimated at between £250,000 and £500,000 (specialist procurement advice, Kevin Barry BSc(Hons) MRICS, campaign project file). The annual net subsidy for the Strangford Ferry Service is £2,090,000 (Freedom of Information disclosure DFI-2024-0366). The study costs between six weeks and three months of ferry subsidy — paid once. The ferry costs that money every year, indefinitely, generating no capital asset and creating no permanent solution.

The Shared Island Fund, with EUR 2 billion committed to 2035 under the National Development Plan Sectoral Plan: Shared Island (July 2025), provides a route to funding the feasibility study at no net cost to the Northern Ireland public purse. The Irish Government’s formal response to this campaign (reference DOT-TM25-11858-2025, Christina Downey, Department of the Taoiseach, 16 September 2025) confirmed that Irish Government co-operation requires Northern Ireland to first progress through feasibility and development stages. DfI is the only body with the authority to take that first step.

What we are asking the Minister to do when she visits

We are not asking Minister Kimmins to commit to a bridge. We are not asking her to commit to any design, any alignment, any cost or any timetable for construction.

We are asking her to commission a Transport Appraisal Guidance-compliant independent feasibility study, so that for the first time in the history of this proposal there is a credible, independently verified evidence base on which a properly informed decision can be made.

If the study concludes that the crossing is not viable, that conclusion will be on the record, properly evidenced, and this campaign will respect it. What this campaign cannot accept is a Department continuing to decline an assessment on the basis of a thirteen-year-old review and an internal guesstimate that its own author said should not be treated as a reliable figure.

Minister Kimmins, you said on Monday that it would be remiss of you to say you are not looking at this issue. You said you need more information. You said you need to look at it again and see what is possible.

We agree. The feasibility study is how you do that. We hope your visit to Strangford this week convinces you to commission it.

All claims in this post are supported by named, dated, retrievable primary sources held in the Campaign project archive. The verbatim Assembly record is taken from the Northern Ireland Assembly Official Report, Monday 11 May 2026, AQO 3527/22-27. Full source references are available at www.strangfordloughcrossing.org.

Strangford Lough Crossing Campaign | Kevin Barry BSc(Hons) MRICS | mail@kevinbarryqs.com | www.strangfordloughcrossing.org