Keep It In The Family
Irish Government to sell off National Airline
Do you remember how you felt when you saw your first Aer Lingus plane with the shamrock on its tailfin? I do, I’m smiling now to think about it – the eddy of excitement and pride that coursed through me. Look, it’s one of ours! I was taken on a day trip to Shannon airport from my grandparents’ house in County Limerick, back in the early 1970s when just visiting an airport to gape at everything was a treat.
I marvelled at so much that we take for granted now – at escalators, automatic doors and great sheets of glass showcasing the air strip. And on the other side of the windows were those jumbo jets which, you felt, belonged to all of us. The shamrock told you so. Later, when I was 17 and working in France as an au pair, homesick and lonely, I would catch the airport bus on my day off to watch the afternoon Aer Lingus flight taxi across the tarmac and disgorge its girls in green. It was a link with home. It’s always a link with Ireland, wherever we are in the world and whatever our circumstances. After a poignant week in New York covering the 9-11 tragedy, I heaved a sigh of relief to see the Aer Lingus plane – a beacon in that bleak version of JFK stripped of aircraft – that would carry me back to Dublin. Once on board and surrounded by the familiar livery, it almost felt as though I was home already. Today, I’m unsophisticated enough to feel a catch in my throat still whenever I’m abroad and glimpse an Aer Lingus plane. Look, it’s one of ours!
Maybe it’s nostalgia, maybe it’s because we’re an island race, maybe it’s as simple as the sentimental tug of a shamrock logo. But there’s undeniably an umbilical cord between us and Aer Lingus. We feel for it as we do for no other state body – not Bord na Mona, not the ESB or VHI. I guess it represented glamour at a time when we had precious little of that commodity in our lives. And even now, after air travel has shed its chic and pilots are no longer pin-ups, a residue of charm clings to the Aer Lingus name.
I never said it was logical, I’m just saying that’s how it is. As a result many of us feel uneasy when the Taoiseach speaks of selling our national airline, and stating it as categorically as if there’s no scope for dissent. We’ve listened to the financial forensics, the need for investment in hideously expensive aircraft, the problems associated with governments bailing out indigent national carriers, and we understand we’re in a Ryanair marketplace. However I have an atavistic reaction against that attitude of ‘it’s unsustainable – let’s sell’. And I don’t believe I’m alone. Look around: we’re surrounded by men and women in grey suits with no room for sentiment and no grasp of anything except what is profit-driven. But we don’t have to allow them free rein – we can say no to the corporate financiers.
Currently we’re engrossed in a collective debate about the kind of race we’re becoming post-boomtime. Too money-obsessed, too fixated on house prices, too engrossed by status? That these issues are raised shows we’re troubled about the way some traditional values were trampled underfoot in our stampede to become ritzier versions of the people we once were.
We keep agreeing we shouldn’t sacrifice everything to mammon … even as we do precisely that. Well, here’s our chance to show our mettle. Instead of delivering up Aer Lingus to the private sector we could try structuring a development package for our national airline – saving 3,500 jobs into the bargain.
Have we looked thoroughly into leasing aircraft, for example; I know it’s cheaper but is buying a new fleet of transatlantic carriers the only solution? And why won’t the Government invest in a profit-making national asset? Those much-brandished Brussels regulations only preclude any bail-out of a haemorrhaging Aer Lingus, not investment in it now when it’s viable.
This Government has no qualms about sinking money into white elephants, as in e-voting (€52m frittered away) or health service computers which don’t work (another €170m squandered). Aer Lingus has performed respectably in a difficult aviation market, however, and with Ryanair – Ryanair, enough said – in its own backyard. If that doesn’t deserve some outlay, what does?
Granted, this means acting on the basis of what Aer Lingus once stood for rather than what it represents now in the real world. But surely we have leeway to do that occasionally; surely all verdicts can’t be ruled solely on the basis of economics. Hard-headed decisions can prove as mistaken as less pragmatic ones in the long run.
There’s something else, of course. If Aer Lingus is sold then a Stock Market flotation seems the likeliest option and the memory of Eircom still rankles. We threw away a national asset there and we stand to lose another one here. National assets aren’t so numerous that we can afford to be profligate with them.
A privatised Aer Lingus will be either subsumed into a larger company or flogged off piecemeal. It was paid for by our parents’ and grandparents’ taxes, and I object to corporate bodysnatchers filleting it for their own gain – treating themselves to yachts or luxury cars with their bonuses from the sale of an institution built up painstakingly by the taxes of previous generations. Oh, they’ll lob a few euro the Exchequer’s way, these financier boot boys, but once that’s spent something irreplaceable will be gone. And all for a paltry €400m or so – that wouldn’t even pay for half the Dublin Port Tunnel.
On RTE’s Prime Time on Tuesday night my blood ran cold to hear Aer Lingus chief executive Dermot Mannion repeatedly insist there could be no guarantees about jobs or the airline’s future after its sale. The only guarantee he would offer was the utter lack of them. And for that, we surrender Aer Lingus?
It’s an emotive term, an island nation, but it’s what we are. We depend on the transportation of people and supplies in and out of the country, and air traffic is the obvious means. We don’t have much in the way of an air force or navy but we do have a well-run national carrier. We need Ryanair, too, to maintain competition but my heart shrinks at the thought of Ryanair alone in our skies. Meanwhile I’m tired of decisions being taken on nothing but a financial basis. I’m tired of balance sheets being the only morality. I’m tired of an ethos which elevates ditching above fixing.
An auctioned-off Aer Lingus may retain the shamrock on its tailfin for brand and marketing purposes, but I can’t imagine ever pointing to it and smiling: ‘Look, it’s one of ours!’ It won’t be ours any more.
