Holyhead an industrial port city at Liverpool's expense

Have Holyhead grow as the main port city for Dublin at Liverpool's expense, and attract many of the dock side industries that in OTL go to Liverpool. Have this happen so that the 100,000 welsh speakers who in OTL 1910 are living in Liverpool are living in Caergybi. Have there also be a Holyhead University rather than one at Bangor and have it be a lot bigger.

In my opinion it would really benefit the welsh language in north Wales as a whole.

How do you think Holyhead would fare economically?
 
Problem 1 is that it's an island. The first bridge linking the island to mainland Wales was in the 1820s. So... that's a pretty major barrier in plausibility.

So having Holyhead as a port would defeat some of the purpose, as everything would have to be redistributed to mainland Britain again.
 
Problem number 2, it's massively far away from anywhere that you actually want to transport goods to.

You've got coal in the North West and around the River Dee, the cotton mills of Manchester and so on and so forth. Liverpool is still likely to be a major port just because it's a lot cheaper to ship goods from Manchester or Preston to Liverpool rather than right along the entire north coast of Wales.
 
Problem 3 - Holyhead isn't a deepwater port. At a certain point, one that will probably arrive earlier than you think, more and more ships will be too large to use the harbour, at which point the port goes into a catastrophic spiral and all those Welsh speakers who were in Liverpool OTL go to Glasgow and New York and Sydney and Birmingham instead.

Bit of a nitpick, BTW - whilst Liverpool had a sizeable chunk of heavy industry, its wealth was mostly mercantile.
 
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