INSIDE POLITICS - SHANNON AND THE DAA

We have another new story on Shannon this morning in the Examiner. We established the DAA also learned of Aer Lingus's plans to axe the Shannon to Heathrow service in June of this year, but did not inform its subsidiary, the Shannon Airport Authority.

By Harry McGee, Political Editor
DUBLIN Airport Authority did not inform Shannon Airport Authority that Aer Lingus was seriously considering transferring all its Heathrow slots to Belfast even though it became fully aware of the situation in June.


In a development that is likely to add to tensions between the Dublin Authority (DAA) and its Shannon subsidiary (SAA); a spokesman for DAA told the Irish Examiner this weekend that the DAA first learnt of the proposed move on June 13.

For full story, see here

The DAA say that the information (that Shannon might lose its slots) was received from the Department of Transport in the strictest confidence. Therefore, because of a Chinese Walls situation, it was not in a position on to its Shannon subsidiary.

Now all the interested parties, the Department, the DAA etc are saying that Shannon was only one of a number of options at that stage. But it's as clear as night follows day that on June 13, Belfast was already the clear favourite.

The principal officer in the Department of Transport took the trouble to ring up DAA after he had spoken to Aer Lingus. It's clear that his impression was that Aer Lingus were close to making a decision in favour of Belfast. That's the clear import of his memo for the minister's information that never made it to the Minister. It's agreed up to the highest political level (that's Noel Dempsey folks) that any fair reading of that memo would conclude that Belfast had almost had in the bag.

This morning, Tadhg Kearney, a board member of the Shannon Airport Authority was beside himself with irritation about the development. And his chairman Pat Shanahan has scheduled an emergency board meeting for tomorrow.

In a sense the DAA had its hands tied. The Department of Transport qua Government is a listed shareholder of Aer Lingus. It's sharing of that sensitive information with the SAA could have led to the accusation that one shareholder could be in a position to manipulate a decision of Aer Lingus management.

The new disclosures of the past week show the utter powerlessness of government in influencing Aer Lingus's direction once it allowed the company go private. The Government really over-exaggerated its influence upon the company. In reality with a 25% shareholding (and its laughable 'golden share') it has little to none.

It also shows how high emotion is still running in the Mid West over this. Over 4,000 appeared in Limerick on Saturday to protest against the loss of the Heathrow slots.

I think the tide is turning against local Fianna Fail TDs and Senators. Limerick West TD John Cregan was booed when he tried to speak on the stage. Locals are beginning to suspect that the FFers are all playing the role of Tadhg an Dá Thaobh.

INSIDE POLITICS - DEMPSEY: THE KNOWN KNOWNS AND THE UNKNOWN UNKNOWNS

WHEN an embarrassing story appears — like our one that showed early departmental knowledge of the axing of Shannon’s Heathrow slots — the conspiracy theories are never far behind.

For what they are worth, here’s a sample of them: Noel Dempsey knew all along — he must have! The Government planned all of this years ago and are now trying to cover their behinds! There was a second memo on the grassy knoll. And there’s a guy in the Department of Transport who I’d swear is Elvis.

Okay, we are being a teensy weensy bit facetious here. But it’s important to separate what conclusions can be drawn; and what conclusions can’t be from this very important exposure.

The first cardinal rule is that you have to go along with the available evidence.
And what does this show? It shows that far from the decision suddenly being made public by Aer Lingus after months of secret plotting, they had kept the Department of Transport (and others) in the loop about their thinking all along. It shows that the department was aware at the most
senior level on June 14 and was fully aware of the serious repercussions this would have for Shannon Airport.

But inexplicably and inexcusably, the new Minister Noel Dempsey was never informed.
The Freedom of Information records released to the Irish Examiner are a glaring example of communications failure at a senior level. Those who suspect that the Government didn’t realise how enormous an issue Shannon would be until it happened will find an armoury of ammunition here.

That hiatus of six weeks when nothing was done, or nobody reported to their political master, was simply not good enough. The effort to save Shannon’s slots might have failed ultimately, but they would have been in a far better position than the desperate rearguard action Mr Dempsey had to engage in after the decision was made in August.
And we come to the corollary of this, the equally important debate. What do the records not show?

Well, they show us absolutely nothing to suggest that MrNoel Dempsey was at fault, despite all the suppositions and conspiracy theories. In fairness, he can’t be blamed either for presiding over a department that made a dog’s dinner of an issue. The reason? He had just been appointed and was not even inon his first day in office when this mess happened.

So what was the state of his knowledge? Mr Dempsey told the Dáil on September 27 that the first inkling he got that Shannon was losing ALL its slots was on August 3.
In a conversation I had with him this week he said that from about mid-July (though he couldn’t pin down the exact time) he was aware that Aer Lingus was actively seeking out a new base.

He accepted that he would have had a general awareness that would have meant that a Heathrow slot or two would have been required. However,But what he was not aware of until that fateful meeting with Dermot Mannion and John Sharman on August 3 was that Shannon would lose ALL its slots.

Sure, opposition spokespeople and the media have unearthed half a dozen examples of leaks and heavy hints being dropped that Shannon-Heathrow was in danger of being axed.

And in a way, yes, it looks like the Government did not just have its eye on the ball. Mr Dempsey was like the guy in the Kit Kat ad who spends hours at the zoo — poised with his camera — waiting for the panda bears to appear. Just when he turns around to have his Kit Kat, the panda bears come out and skate around.

Be that as it may, the presumption must be that Mr Dempsey is telling the truth. This isn’t like the nursing homes controversy, where there was a conflict of evidence between Micheal Martin and the top civil servant in Health. The civil servant involved put his hands up immediately admitting his failure to forward the memo to the minister.

Until evidence emerges to the contrary, it is the height of silliness for Labour’s Tommy Broughan to call for Mr Dempsey’s resignation.

The opposition may not find it credible that the minister was left completely in the dark, but there is simply no evidence to back up their suspicions that he knew.

INSIDE POLITICS - SHANNON

My colleague Sean McCarthaigh's article this morning on the famous June 13 memo has dominated political discourse all day in the Dáil. (read the article here)

It indicated that the Department of Transport knew that the Shannon slots were in jeopardy some six weeks before the Minister Noel Dempsey found out about it in late July/early August.

Fianna Fail was fully aware of the implications of the story. All its TDs and Senators were briefed yesterday before the records were released to the Irish Examiner. So were all the political advisers across every department.

This story has worrying echoes of the controversy over nursing home charges that almost felled Micheal Martin (see here).

Here is my own analysis of the story from this morning's paper:


TO SAY that this June 13 memo will have serious
repercussions for the Government and for Transport Minister Noel Dempsey is the understatement of this relatively new millennium.

From the moment Aer Lingus unleashed a political firestorm by
announcing that it was favouring Belfast over Shannon, the Government was caught on the hop.

In his first reaction, Mr Dempsey seems to have completely misinterpreted the mood of the public. Disappointed for Shannon, delighted for Belfast was the ‘you win some, you lose some’ refrain.

It was only when furious aviation workers, the business community, and politicians (including virtually every Fianna Fáil TD, senator and councillor in the mid-west) started to kick up an almighty fuss that the Government began to get exercised in any way.

But from the start, the core of its very defence was just that it was ‘caught on the hop’. Aer Lingus, it suggested, had presented the decision as a fait accompli; and there was nothing that the Government could do about this bolt out of the blue.

In the Dáil debate on Shannon on September 27, Mr Dempsey said: “At a short meeting with the chairman (John Sharman) and chief executive (Dermot Mannion) of Aer Lingus on the 3rd of August I was informed that they intended to open a hub in Belfast and to transfer the Shannon-Heathrow slots to that route.”
This suggests this was the first time he learned of the decision.

Nor can we ignore the celebrated comments of Minister Willie O’Dea: “Dermot Mannion can’t come along on a bank holiday Monday and turn into a latterday Oliver Cromwell.”
But the explosive Note for the Minister’s Information released to
the Irish Examiner under the FOI Act demolishes that spin.

The first thing that should be noted is that it’s a note to the minister. That’s Noel Dempsey, who said he first learned about the decision on August 3. But this note is dated June 13, some seven weeks earlier.

Sure June 13 is the day before he was appointed to Transport. But he should have nevertheless received this note (soon after his appointment). It doesn’t mince its words.

It states baldly , unceremoniously, that Shannon is on the cusp of losing its Heathrow slots. On its face, the note would lead to the gravest political consequences for Mr Dempsey. No reading of the note would suggest anything other than the airline is close to a decision favouring Belfast.

It goes on to clearly spell out that this would lead to a cessation of the Shannon to Heathrow service.

Politically, Noel Dempsey and the Government were correctly criticised for underestimating the depth of feeling over Shannon and for doing too little too late. But part of its defence was predicated on not learning about the decision until effectively after it was made.

If this Note for the Minister’s Information had been actually forwarded to Mr Dempsey, his last act as Transport Minister would have been to walk the political plank in August once news of the controversy emerged.

And that is why department officials included an unprecedented “contextual note” with the FOI documents, explaining this June 13 note. They knew that implications for Dempsey f the note was read without explanation Mr Dempsey would be a goner.

And that contextual note explains that the note for the minister was drafted by a principal officer in the department, and passed on to an assistant secretary, the second-highest ranking official in the department.

But for a reason that has not been disclosed, the note “was not forwarded to the minister”.

This has echoes of the controversy about then Health Minister Micheál Martin’s degree of awareness of the problem concerning the legal basis of nursing home charges, and his disagreement with his most senior official that a note had been forwarded to him.

The fact that this note was not forwarded is baffling. The contextual note doesn’t explain why. And what is even more baffling is that the so-called contextual note (obviously written in the past few weeks) goes on to state that the assistant secretary, John Murphy, was fully aware of the potentially serious
nature of the Aer Lingus decision.

So concerned was he that on the day that he received the note, he actually rang Dermot Mannion, the chief executive of Air Lingus.

“The assistant secretary conveyed the concerns of the department, from an aviation and regional development perspective, about the implications of a reduction in the Shannon-Heathrow service,” says the contextual note.

Well, the minister was not aware but civil servants at the highest level of
his department were aware of the implications for Shannon from June but had neither informed Mr Dempsey about it then or later. Nor was any effort made during June or July to dissuade Aer Lingus from following a course that was clearly running against the spirit of the Government’s commitment to retain connectivity for Shannon.

It begs several serious questions. Why was the minister not informed? In his Dáil speech, Mr Dempsey said he was informed of the decision on August 3. Was he aware before then that establishing a hub at Belfast was being actively pursued by Aer Lingus and that it would entail the loss of Heathrow slots for Shannon?

When did he find out that his own department had been aware of the
potential cessation of Heathrow services from Shannon since June 13? If he knew (even in August or September), why did he not inform the Dáil or the public about it?
Why were the implications for Shannon from a regional development and aviation perspective not referred to in the original note to the minister? Were the concerns

Mr Murphy expressed to Mr Mannion reduced to writing? Given the Government’s sharp
retrospective criticism of Aer Lingus’s decision, why the inertia from Transport during June and July over a vitally important policy area. There was a break-down somewhere. And you suspect that heads will have to roll.

INSIDE POLITICS - FF THINK-IN AT DRUID'S GLEN

Question: What’s got a trunk, floppy ears, massive legs and grey crinkly skin?

Answer: A Fianna Fail press conference.

We had 50 minutes of it yesterday at the Fianna Fail parliamentary party meeting at Druid’s Glen including a 15 minute marathon answer from Tánaiste Brian Cowen on the economy, construction, the fundamentals, soft landings, liquidity, Northern Rock, Kerry’s victory in the All Ireland, and the spillover the sub-prime market in the US has globally.

And all the time stampeding from the corner was the elephant but the ignoring of said vast grey mammal by the top table at Fianna Fail was admirable.
When the inevitable question arose about the Mahon Tribunal, Taoiseach Bertie Ahern went into schtum mode, as he had done when being harassed by reporters during the election campaign. The question, when it arrived, was adroitly posed by TV3’s Ursula Halligan, who asked him how people had reacted to his appearance last week.

He wasn’t going to go there, he said. When she persisted, he just clammed up, pursing his lips into a rictus smile. There was a brief embarrassed silence, nothing like the extraordinary eight seconds of silence that occurred during the election campaign. But the message was clear; the subject is off limits.

The Taoiseach’s uncomfortable journey through his own marathon examination at Mahon has been the undertow of the two day annual think-in of the parliamentary party. To be sure, it was never going to be any other way, given the fact that the think-in is now sandwiched between his two appearances. But it was clear that everybody in the party was following the Boss’s lead – by saying nothing. The only thing of significance that Ahern said was that Willie O’Dea was a “great minister”. That was in response to the remarkable free run O’Dea got in the Sunday Independent to take a swipe at its Tribunal.

Ahern’s problems with his personal finances have overshadowed everything in Fianna Fail since the story first broke exactly a year ago. It panicked Ahern into calling the election early, gouged into his party’s election campaign for an agonising two weeks and is still dominating the party’s agenda in the autumn, just as the Dail returns to business proper. And if he thinks the reporters’ questions are offside, wait till the opposition parties begin to take a cut off him next week in the Dáil.

This is the extent to which it dominated. The other Fianna Fail-related story of the story was the controversial axing by Aer Lingus of its service from Shannon to Heathrow. This think-in was the first opportunity that backbench TDs from the mid-west had an opportunity to vent their frustration publicly over the issue and the Government’s cack-handed handling of it.

Yesterday, nobody brought it up at the plenary session. Nobody that is except the unexpected figure of Senator Mary White (not really associated until now with the save the stopover campaign) who took a huge cut at the leadership for abdicating its responsibility and also reportedly dressed down the Taoiseach’s special adviser Gerry Hickey for shaking his head in disagreement. We have written before about FF rebellions but it was clear that there was no appetite for mutiny yesterday. In previous years, White may have got a round of applause. But yesterday, there was silence.

In recent years, party strategists have realised that the think-in is a good way of capturing the news agenda in the slowish weeks before the Dáil returns. And so every year, there is at least one new initiative and one core message, each drip-fed in a coordinated way to the media. They took on an extra importance for the party this year, in that they would help distract the public’s attention – if only temporarily – from Mahon.

This year’s initiative was FF’s proposal to attempt to do in the North what Sinn Fein is doing in the South. It all sounds very grand except we have heard it all before, at Ard Fheiseanna over the past four or five years. And it’s all very vague. It might or might not involve a tie-up with the SDLP. It might or might not involve Fianna Fail establishing an electoral presence in the North. That only thing that’s solid is that yoke that is beloved of all political parties, a high-powered committee, has been formed to look into it. This one will be chaired by Dermot Ahern.

One other major announcement – the probability that we will have two referenda (one on Europe; the other on children) within the next 12 months. Will the age of consent be broached? Again Ahern was very circumspect, saying that it would be very hard for all parties to reach consensus on this.

The core message was simple – the economy stupid. On a day when Irish customers of Northern Rock began queuing for their money at its only Irish branch on Harcourt Street, it was important for the Taoiseach and the Tánaiste to come out with a positive line.
There was no need to panic, was the key message.

Or be to verbatim about it, this is what Ahern actually said:

“There is no place for negativity. No need for any pessimism. Above all, there is no place for politically motivated attempts to talk down the economy and the achievements of our people across all sectors.”

Ahern was particularly dismissive of one headline that said the economy was crashing.

“They are not economists who say things like that. Anyone who says that knows nothing about nothing. You wouldn’t give them a dime going down to the shop.”

He and Cowen accepted that construction had ‘moderated’ or was facing a soft landing. The figures behind those euphemisms are that new starts on houses will fall from 90,000 last year to 75,000 this year to as low as 60,000 next year. And double digit growth in departmental budgets ain’t going to happen next year. The message from Cowen was that it all must be manageable and sustainable.

This was the first PP meeting after the election and it was low-key, subdued. Especially compared to the high octane ones beginning in 2004 at Inchdoney when FF revved itself up into election footing.

This was as flat as the plains of Kildare. Not because it's the beginning of a long slog (the 2012 election), but because it's right in the middle of one (Ahern's money problems).

INSIDE POLITICS - WILLIE O'DEA AND SHANNON

You arrive back from your holidays to find that your home has been robbed. You go to the police station, where a bored sergeant with his heels on the desk twiddles his thumbs and tells you that there’s nothing that they can do about it, forget about it, and go home. You protest, but just as you’re building yourself into a froth of fury, the sergeant kicks you out the door. On the way home, you get mugged by a gang of hoodies who also give you a good kicking while you cower on the pavement. As you arrive home badly injured to your burgled house, your worried neighbour asks are you ok.

“Me,” you reply perkily, “I couldn’t be better.”

Such was the nature of Willie O’Dea’s reaction to what amounted to a public dressing down by Cabinet colleagues over Shannon.

The Minister for Defence professed himself “extremely pleased” with the outcome of yesterday’s marathon Cabinet discussion on Shannon, and, to boot, asked all the groups lobbying to retain the Shannon to Heathrow service to step back to allow the Government space to resolve the crisis.

But what is the resolution? Was the Government going to force Aer Lingus’s hand? Was it going to use the ‘golden share’ it so mercilessly hyped (reminds you of a sheep in wolf’s clothing) to force Dermot Mannion and his management buddies to back off? Was it going to abstain – or worse, still back Ryanair – in a vote if an Emergency General Meeting is held in October?

Erm, no. The Government yesterday said what it has been saying over the past month. The Aer Lingus decision is a done deal and it’s not going to be reversed. That means it’s not going to interfere with the decision. It also means (but this has yet to be teased out) that it won’t vote against the Aer Lingus management if Ryanair gets its way and forces an EGM on the Heathrow slots issue. It also means that it won’t even abstain.

If you can square Willie O’Dea’s earlier descriptions of ‘Armageddon’ and Shannon being ‘cut off from the rest of the world’ with yesterday’s ‘extremely pleased’ then you will have cracked the mystery that is Fianna Fail’s enduring ability to be for and against something at the same time.

All those empty stories of rebellion and cabinet splits came to naught. Eamon O Cuiv and John Gormley never questioned the agreed Government position, despite attempts by the Sunday Independent to paint them as rebels. And Willie O’Dea’s protests were always going to be more about form than substance.

All of the Government’s efforts will now be thrown into finding an alternative carrier to connect Shannon to an international hub. But talks with airlines are not as advanced as were reported this week. The Government knows that it will have a full-blown crisis on its hand if some alternative is not found – with a lot of the most pugnacious stuff coming from FF TDs and Senators in the region.

Politically too, the Government deserves to take a pasting for over-exaggerating the influence of the so-called ‘golden share’ last October. Never once was it mentioned during the Ryanair takeover battle that Shannon was in danger of losing its slots, even though the Transport Minister admitted yesterday that possibility was known at the time.

But since about August 12, its line has been clear. Dempsey even stood over his comments back then that some of the claimed impacts were “exaggerated”. He agreed yesterday it would have ‘some impact’ and the Government’s was discounting that. But he said that some people were talking about the lost of 10,000 jobs and 50,000 jobs and of the region being devastated.

“Overly stating the impact can do damage to the region. We do not want to create an impression that there is devastation (when there’s not),” he argued.

There were some scarier statements, he said. And what about the Armageddon envisaged by his Cabinet colleague Willie O’Dea.

“It applies to any of the scarier statement,” said Dempsey, lumping the Defence Minister with those who had exaggerated.

No wonder he was extremely pleased yesterday.

INSIDE POLITICS - OD of O'Dea

It was the dog that didn’t bark who decided it at the end of the day.

A bit like the plot-line of the Hound of the Baskervilles, we were all listening to the wrong dogs barking up the wrong trees.

Over the past week, it was all Willie O’Dea putting on his own end-of-the-pier act. Roll-up! Roll-up! Watch the Minister for Defence in his all new rage and fury show. You think Gordon Brown’s four-hour holiday was self sacrifice? Witness an Irish Government minister who has defied human nature by not taking a holiday for a full two years. Marvel as he builds himself into such a tornado of outrage that he self-immolates before your very eyes.

And, politically, that’s more or less what happened.

As a colleague acidly put it on Thursday: “Willie went one Morning Ireland too far.”
We have not heard a peep out of Bertie Ahern since the controversy first erupted ten days ago. Actually for almost a week, it seemed that the entire Cabinet had become anchorites, with Government Buildings shrouded in a monastic silence.

That was, until Willie O’Dea arrived back from the first holiday he had taken for a full two years. And from there on in, we got a spectacular full-on Broadway production – a chorus line of 100 councillors and co-starring roles for half a dozen local TDs and two junior ministers. But there was only one star.

The Minister for Defence gave a bravura performance of defiance and bluster all week. So much so that you kind of suspected that he was beginning to believe in his own invincibility. He would force, erm, persuade Aer Lingus of the errors of its ways. He spoke of an Armageddon scenario, of the mid-west of Ireland being cut off from the rest of the world because of the loss of Heathrow. Seriously, cut off from the rest of the world.

In his only substantial comments on the controversy, Transport Minister Noel Dempsey said he agreed with Dermot Mannion that some of the claims being made about the downside of the Aer Lingus decision were exaggerated.

On Morning Ireland, Willie responded to that in this manner: “(Noel Dempsey) is taking his own advice. In this situation unfortunately that advice does not convey the seriousness of the situation here.”

That was a blooper if ever there was one. The comments served to undermine Dempsey and his authority. O’Dea had clearly overstepped the mark.

And still the dog didn’t bark. Bertie Ahern (still on holidays but apparently working away behind the scenes) said nothing.

But then on Thursday evening, a statement was issued in the name of Education Minister Mary Hanafin. In the second paragraph, it noted that she was “speaking on behalf of the Government”.

The key line came in the next paragraph: “As a listed plc, Aer Lingus has to take its own decisions. It is inappropriate for the Government to intervene in the decision-making of a private company.”

That was it. It was over. Bertie Ahern had not uttered one syllable in ten days. But the mark of the Anorak was all over the statement. O’Dea was now being put firmly in his place. Two of Ahern’s most senior loyalists, Mary Hanafin and Dermot Ahern, were wheeled out to repeat the Government line. Aer Lingus has made its decision and that decision is would stand.

It was the one act of decisiveness by a Government in a fortnight of mess and blunder. At least, Aer Lingus chief executive Dermot Mannion knew where he stood before meeting local politicians and business leaders and knew it wasn’t a case of the Government showing him the door, as it did with Willie Walsh.

The stance will be politically unpopular (and that’s as mild an assessment as possible). Ahern and Cabinet ministers will have a rough passage through meetings with its own representatives from the region.

But at the same time you have to also question Willie O’Dea’s judgement. Is he or isn’t he a member of the Cabinet and answerable to collective responsibility? As a Minister, he was party to the decision to privatise Aer Lingus and should be brave enough to live with the consequences (despite what he said this week, the airline did not need to be privatised to raise the funds for fleet replacement). And O’Dea has put local interest above national interest on every occasion – on the deregulation of taxis; on Barrington’s hospital and frequently on Shannon. Other ministers like Dempsey (with an incinerator in Meath) and Micheal Martin (over Cork Airport) have been prepared to take the heat that goes with being a Minister.

And the dog might not have barked this week. But boy, did it still have a fierce bite.

This is my column from today's Irish Examiner

INSIDE POLITICS - LOOK UP IT'S AER LINGUS AND A FLYING PIG

On Politics
Harry McGee
Politics, during the summer, is as dead as vaudeville. Of course at the same time we need to ink our pages, even during the most taciturn and underwhelming days of silly season.
Since the dawn of civilisation, government ministers tend to disappear during August leaving one or two ministers on duty during the month.
On very slow weeks, somebody will mention at a news conference that the Taoiseach is out of the country.
That will lead to the inevitable question from a senior editorial person: “Well if he’s abroad, who else had skived off? And who has been left behind to run the country?”
Occasionally, fate will deliver a golden hand and intelligence will come back confirming that the only minister who’s still around is the most junior, gaffe-prone, incompetent, ill-regarded and generally hated minister.
The next step in the process will be to find a crisis of some kind– no matter how unimportant or infinitesimally small – and then take the silk purse (a marginal rise in unemployment figures; some hospital cock-up) and make a proper pig’s ear of it.
CRISIS AND LOOK WHO’S LEFT RUNNING THE COUNTRY? will scream the (totally unjustified and totally over-the-top) headline, the following morning.
Yes, it’s cynical and it can be a cheap shot. But it can also be highly effective. John Prescott was Tony Blair’s deputy prime minister and the man in charge of the country when the PM was abroad. But the man who was nominally running the country was photographer playing croquet with his staff in his summer residence. That did untold damage to the country.
Last Sunday we saw this at the worst when the Sunday Independent launched Scuds of outrage and bombast in the direction of Tánaiste Brian Cowen. His crime? He had gone off on holidays to the Algarve. The crisis? The housing market had collapsed and the economy was in freefall. I don’t know about you but somehow I didn’t notice Armageddon last weekend. It just seemed to pass me right by.
The fact is that crises during the summer are more manufactured than real. The last really deep crisis to beset a government here happened in the summer of 1982 with the sensational news that a double murder suspect Malcolm Macarthur had been staying in the flat of the then Attorney General, Patrick Connolly. The A-G was due to fly out on his holidays to the US the next day and refused to alter his plans. The Taoiseach, Charles Haughey, was on his holiday island of Inisvickilaun and either at the end of either a very bad line or a very good wine. When first contacted he didn’t grasp the depth of the crisis. The following day – when all hell broke loose – he cottoned on very quickly.
But then,
Then just when we though silly season had reached its nadir, along comes a real crisis. Not only did it catch the Government completely off guard, it also found both main opposition parties with their eye off the ball – their transport spokespeople were nowhere to be seen (or heard) earlier this week.
What was extraordinary about the Aer Lingus story was that, for once, the ‘who’s left running the country?’ attack was valid. Since the its announcement on Tuesday, the Government has given us the benefit of one full sentence. The Taoiseach won’t speak. The Minister for Transport won’t speak. The Minister for Enterprise won’t speak. The Minister for Finance won’t speak. And only belatedly did the Minister for Defence speak. Willie O’Dea said he was aghast at the disgraceful decision. Sure, wasn’t everybody in the mid-west similarly aghast.
The question for O’Dea is: what is the Government going to do about it? It’s all very well for Willie O’Dea to criticise Aer Lingus but if the Taoiseach and the relevant government ministers are not going to do anything, or not even going to say anything, all he’s involved in is a exercise to give him political cover.
The Government made a huge play about safeguarding Heathrow slots and ensuring balanced regional connectivity when it allowed Aer Lingus to cut the apron strings. Was this part of an under-the-table deal? Did senior Government ministers really only learn last Friday? Why didn’t the Government use its 25.4% shareholding as leverage?
The capitulation of deed and word has been a disgrace. And the Government’s continuing silence is an insult to the people of the mid-west and also to its back-bench TDs. The problem with third-term governments isn’t that the citizens begin to grow indifferent to them; it’s that they begin to grow indifferent to the citizens.