History

Ireland’s political class didn’t react favourably to the proposed Loopline Bridge stating that the view of the Customs House was one of the few things left to the Irish, the Act of Union having taken away just about everything else. ‘An act of vandalism’ was another sentiment expressed in letters to the editor of The Freeman’s Journal, the writers urged moving it east of the Customs House. The Cork Chamber of Commerce and Shipping fretted over the future of the transatlantic route from that city. The Loopline, they argued, would strengthen the Dublin - Liverpool connection, at their expense.

For others, the Loopline was the iron clad symbol of Victorian capitalism in a city divided by wealth and class. The middle classes had largely migrated to the airy suburbs and in the shadow of the Loopline, their empty mansions were fast becoming the rat infested slums of the poor. However with the backing of Ireland’s richest man, Sir Edward Guinness who reportedly invested £20,000, construction went ahead in 1889. Various assessments of its suitability had been undertaken, including putting a strip of yellow tape across a photograph of the Customs House to measure visual impact. The bridge opened in 1891.

The history of the Loopline is peppered with plans to somehow render it appealing or to do away with it. In the 1920s Dublin Corporation investigated the possibility of replacing it with a rail tunnel under the Liffey, an idea which surfaced again in 1967. Even before the Loopline, two shafts had been sunk in the Liffey in 1864 and a tunnel declared unfeasible. A reader of the Irish Independent suggested in 1941 that the archways of the railway bridge could be quite readily converted to air raid shelters given the times that were in it. Erskine Childers suggested, in the early 1970s, painting a mural on the Loopline and in 1973, his fellow politician, Mr Lemass, felt emboldened to say the Loopline had only five years left, as the seeds of the International Financial Services Centre were sown and a new bridge was planned.

The Institute of Engineers of Ireland (now Engineers Ireland) held a competition in 1993 for a replacement which would enhance the view of the Customs House. An exhibition of the sixteen entries drew great attendance. The winning design, costed at £1.8 million, was a sleek and slender structure allowing a more pleasing river vista but also destined for the history pages as another ‘what might have been’.