And back to the issue of the forthcoming order for helicopters for the Army. It should be a clear-cut matter: which helicopter of the three variants is best suited for the long-term needs of the Defence Forces, and which provides best performance, optimum versatility and long-term value for money.
Lord bless us, if it were only that simple. For we have the Defence Forces in one corner, and in the other, that great bruising heavyweight, the political clout of north Co Dublin. NCD is the classic statist constituency, where a largely artificial economy depends upon State-created or State-protected monopolies. It is the communist tail on the capitalist dog, and come election time, the Fingal Soviet can get the wealth-creating part of the country flopping all over the place like a piece of seaweed .
Thousands employed
While the rest of Ireland gets on with living in the real trading world, the Fingal Socialist Republic remains part of the communist block: Aer Lingus, Aer Rianta, FLS Aerospace (formerly Team Aer Lingus) employ thousands of people, and their market positions are not sustained by their economic performance but by a block of 12 local TDs and by the political manipulations of a Government Minister for Fingal (also known as the Minister for Industry and Commerce), Mary O'Rourke.
Now the needs of the Defence Forces of a sovereign republic should logically outweigh those of a half-county, but of course it's not that simple. Perhaps as a legacy of the Civil War, the Defence Forces are about as enthusiastic about politicking as Mary O'Rourke is about gambolling naked on a nudist beach. Generations of soldiers have seen political compromises determining equipment acquisition, and have obediently acquiesced in whatever rubbish was foisted on them: Why thank you, sir, they would murmur obediently as they gazed at a rusty Model-T Ford without tyres which they would henceforth be expected to call "tank".
And politicking, the business at which the Army is least adept, is now at the heart of the acquisition of its new helicopters: and for the term politicking, one might equally say "short-termism". Sikorski has departed from the initial terms of the procurement tender by promising work to the ailing FLS Aerospace plant at Dublin airport if the Air Corps buys five of its helicopters. But no one has yet bought the Sikorski S 92 helicopter, so the Air Corps would be in the deeply unenviable position of being the launch customer. In other words, if there's anything wrong with it, our boys will be the first to find out (otherwise known as trial in ╔ire).
Voting block
This is a really, really bad idea; but it doesn't mean that we're not going to go down that road, because of that huge voting block of North Dublin TDs, whose priority is re-election, not whether or not the Air Corps gets the wrong aircraft. But then what? What if FLS Aerospace closes anyway? The Air Corps will be stuck with an aircraft for the best part of half-a-century which almost no-one else in the world might be operating, and in return, north Co Dublin will have the world's largest squash court.
Moreover, what TD will be arguing that the Army, finally, should buy the helicopter that can do the tasks required of it? There are no "Army" TDs, no TDs for drowning merchant sailors, no TDs for pilots flying blind out over a storm-tossed Atlantic, no TDs insisting that it is wrong, frivolous and even downright wicked to buy aircraft which might not be up the task of saving life merely in order to be seen to be satisfying the short-term economic needs of one small part of the country.
The most capable - and in the short term, the most expensive - aircraft on offer is the EH 101. It has far greater margins for safety than its competitors, will be flying in over 30 years' time, and has been bought by other countries on Europe's Atlantic seaboard, namely Britain, Portugal and Denmark; so it makes sense to achieve commonality with our EU maritime allies. It has a rear loading-ramp which enables it to carry vehicles, unlike its competitors - a major consideration for the Army's utility requirements.
There is a third option, the one which the button-counters in the Department of Finance possibly slaver over because it is relatively cheap - the Cougar ++, which was resoundingly rejected by the Nordic countries because it is a combination of old plus new: Model-T Ford and Windows 2002. Cheaper, certainly, and equally certainly, out of date soonest; which means far costlier in the long run.
Election time
But even if the Government goes for the Sikorski deal, which will then involve FLS getting maintenance contracts for US Boeings as a quid pro quo, that won't be the end of the affair. For at least one, and maybe both, of the defeated candidates will probably sue in Europe; they could argue that requests for tender spoke only about the need for a good helicopter, not for featherbedding the Fingal Soviet as a political sweetener. This could postpone a decision indefinitely - which, to be sure, would get the Government over the hump of election time, but would also leave the Air Corps helicopterless into the foreseeable future.
And those in Cabinet who make the decisions for the Defence Forces: would they even care? Or are the lives of our airmen and the sailors once again to be balanced against the voting block of the Peoples' Republic of North County Dublin?
