SPARKLING SNOW must have given passengers arriving to Ireland West Airport Knock the impression they were over the Arctic rather than the normally temperate west of Ireland.
“Whatever has happened to the green, green grass of home?” inquired a middle-aged male exile, blinking in the strange brightness of it all, after disembarking from the Ryanair flight from Leeds Bradford.
Teresa Donoghue from Dunmore, Co Galway, who had been looking forward to her first Christmas at home in 32 years, had feared she wouldn’t make it because of the big freeze.
But the pharmacy employee, who lives in Islington, London, got into Knock on the 11am flight from Luton, only an hour behind schedule. Surveying the landscape she said: “I have been all over the world but I have never witnessed travel conditions like this.”
The last two weeks of December have become known as the “disapora days” at Knock because of the number of returning and departing exiles.
Marianne and Maurice Dobbs from Scunthorpe were heading to relatives in the Ox Mountains at Coolaney, Co Sligo, for a five-day break. After a nightmare journey to Leeds Bradford airport because of frozen windscreen wipers, they were looking forward to a relaxing time. “I know all this snow is not for a lot of people but it does look lovely, doesn’t it?” Marianne said.
Geraldine O’Sullivan and her husband Jonathan, from Leeds, were set for Achill. They were a bit concerned about reports that the roads hadn’t all been gritted. “I think the roads rather than air travel are the biggest problem at the moment,” said Geraldine.
Airport management were grateful yesterday that the problems of the previous day, when a number of flights had to be cancelled, were not repeated.
“Christmas, when we handle over 15,000 passengers, is our busiest time of the year,” airport spokesman Donal Healy said. “Nature has thrown everything it can at us in the past weeks but thankfully everything went well today. ”