When I was completing my review of the News Letter during the 1960s and 70s, I remember reading countless complaints from politicians like Harry West about the poor state of the roads in the west of Northern Ireland. We did have the building of the M1 in the 1960s which promised a new era of connectivity for the west with the rest of the province. We know the problems about the motorway stopping at Dungannon in Co.Tyrone. However, the building of the M1 coincided with the Unionist governments decision to close a huge portion of our railway network in that part of the province.
Fast forward to today and we are still having the same debates about the west being short changed in terms of infrastructure. It is easy to blame this on a Belfast mindset, but of the four Regional Development Ministers we have had since 1999, three of them have come from outside of the greater Belfast area.
Question for the Sluggerverse; why can we not solve this problem?
They say a picture is worth a thousand words and our friends over on the investigative website, The Detail have done up this picture is illustrates the problem
David McCann holds a PhD in North-South relations from University of Ulster. You can follow him on twitter @dmcbfs
