Eight hours. The boat which connects Saint-Malo (Ille-et-Vilaine) to Jersey has just docked. The pedestrian street of Saint-Hélier, the capital of the Channel Island, is full of busy passers-by. Employees and customers flock to the banks that make this 116 square kilometer piece of land rich, just a stone’s throw from the Normandy coast. A morning like any other on the island known for its advantageous tax conditions.
Well almost. For several weeks, all the conversations have revolved around the underwater tunnel project intended to connect Guernsey to Jersey, then to France by 2040. At the beginning of March, the chambers of commerce of the two islands organized a meeting with Scandinavian engineers.
At the initiative of this meeting, Martyn Dorey, director of a financial company in Guernsey and president of the Connect 3 Million association, which campaigns for a tunnel between Granville (Channel) and Saint Peter Port (Guernsey). “When I was president of the Guernsey Chamber of Commerce, I was asked what I was doing to foster the links between the Channel Islands and France,” he remembers.
Three hundred and sixty thousand passengers per year
Difficulties of access, supply problems, the aging of the population, and the growing need for labor prompted him to look into the issue in 2019. “I gathered my team and asked them for the craziest ideas to solve these challenges. Among them was the construction of a tunnel. »
This is not the first time that the Channel Islands have considered this, each year around three hundred and sixty thousand passengers travel between the islands and the mainland. “I remember that, in the 2000s, a Jersey MP presented the idea of a bridge to France. At the time, no one cared, relates geographer Christian Fleury, from the University of Caen-Normandy. But this latest project seems much more serious this time. »
Because in the meantime, Brexit has happened. First, it left a bad memory for residents, who were prohibited from participating in the referendum. So close to France, the three Channel Islands (with small Sark) have a very separate status: if they are not strictly part of the United Kingdom, they do depend on the British crown. And, although they have never been part of the European Union, relations with the continent have become considerably complicated since Brexit.
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