Analysis: The Aer Rianta unions are preparing to take their arguments to the public to retrieve lost support, writes Chris Dooley
Your enemy, as the Minister for Transport, Mr Brennan, no doubt knows, can be most dangerous when backed into a corner.
For the past several days the trade union movement, opposed to Mr Brennan's planned break-up of Aer Rianta, appeared cornered and confused.
Talk of mandatory meetings and chaos at the airports coincided with calls for calm heads and a cautious response. Some union officials offered both reactions simultaneously.
The muddled response arose from genuine surprise at Mr Brennan's announcement of the break-up, coming as it did just six days after a conciliatory address by the Taoiseach to the Irish Congress of Trade Unions conference in Tralee.
Mr Ahern drew applause when he said the Government had no desire for conflict with the unions and changes in the semi-State sector could be managed "in a spirit of partnership".
Union leaders wrongly interpreted this as a signal that there would at least be further discussions before any changes were introduced.
By pressing ahead with his well-publicised plans, Mr Brennan set the cat firmly among the pigeons. Whether he intended to or not, he hit the unions where they were weakest by acting on just one of his proposals for Aer Rianta and CIÉ.
For unions, the case against a second terminal at Dublin Airport, which Mr Brennan is also considering, is easy to articulate. The argument goes that a privately run terminal would have to attract a major airline, most likely Aer Lingus or Ryanair, as an anchor tenant, in order to be viable.
Aer Rianta workers believe this will threaten jobs in the existing terminal, and could also lead to the introduction of cheap labour to the airport.
Equally, the unions' opposition to the planned introduction of competition to the Dublin bus market is easily explained.
If Mr Brennan takes 25 per cent of its business away from Dublin Bus and gives it to private operators, there are obvious implications for bus workers.
The break-up of Aer Rianta, however, is a different matter. Nothing is being privatised and no one, the Minister insists, will lose their job.
Why would unions be opposed to that?
Yesterday SIPTU, which represents more than 70 per cent of the airports' workers, began to explain why.
The union's economic adviser, Mr Paul Sweeney, told a press conference in Dublin that the break-up of Aer Rianta amounted to the abolition of Ireland's 30th-largest indigenous company.
Rejecting the notion that the company was a poor performer, he pointed out that the taxpayer had invested €186 million in Aer Rianta to date and had got back more than €200 million in dividends alone.
Breaking it up would absorb "years of management time", delay investment decisions and cause the company to lose economies of scale.
One aviation expert, he said, had put the cost of duplicating arrangements for the three airports at between €2 million and €3 million each per annum.
Cork and Shannon airports, he argued, would not be secure, while the decision to transfer their debts to Dublin was "bizarre".
Abolishing Aer Rianta would devalue the taxpayers' portfolio, lead to higher airport charges, add to passenger costs, threaten jobs and undermine wages and conditions.
The move, he claimed, amounted to an experimental leap in the dark "with too little research and too many risks".
These were just some of the arguments Mr Sweeney made. Persuading Mr Brennan of their merit is probably a lost cause, given that the Minister has clearly made up his mind.
Over the next few weeks, however, the Aer Rianta unions will attempt to take these arguments to the public and retrieve some of the support which they have lost in recent days.
There is a clear recognition that Mr Brennan is winning the public relations battle to date, and unions know that the type of industrial chaos initially threatened for yesterday will not help their cause.
But sources are adamant that, despite their obvious nervousness about the prospect, the unions will not shy away from action if the dialogue they are now seeking with the Government does not deliver results.
"I'll put it like this," one senior official said yesterday.
"Even if we lose this, he [Mr Brennan] will know he has been in a fight."