How is it that the West of Ireland still exercises such a mesmerising power over the Irish political imagination?, asks Kevin Myers
There are more boards for creating jobs in the West than there are in the average attic. Yet these bodies probably accentuated the chronic problem that underlay the region's demented failure to create jobs for the population it was generating. A cargo-cult was forged, predicated on the assumption that jobs were parachuted in from outside. Native initiative was presumed non-existent, and such notions being invariably self-fulfilling, native initiative became accordingly absent.
Wildly improbable industrial projects were imported, with neither the workforce nor work-habits to justify them. How much money did the Ferenka farce in Limerick and the Asahi asinity in Killala cost the State? How much money did it cost their parent companies, plonked in the middle of nowhere because something had to be done to save the West, while capital drained through their leaky bottoms like a saucepan that has been cut horizontally in half? The people of the West, meanwhile, were heading west or east, but not staying put, as subsidised tomato farms were put on north-facing slopes on hills where it rains 300 days a year, and State-backed vineyards were plonked on the bottom of Lough Corrib, and olive groves were planted in the lush swamps of Killala. Where nobody had seen anything more modern than a loy, a brand new plant for making neutron microscopes was erected, and the newly appointed staff sat down on the first day at work to begin to study for their Junior Certificate.
This nonsense did not start, conspicuously fail, and then be brought to a swift but dignified conclusion. No, indeed not: where the olive groves failed, then lemons followed; and where citrus proved unprofitable in the Mayo mud, then surely dates might prosper. The neutron microscope company went bankrupt? Ah well then, let us place an electron-telescope plant in its place: surely that will succeed.
The quintessence of cargo-culture was the Shannon stop-over, for this was no metaphor for the State's economic policy towards the West, but the literal truth. By obliging transatlantic traffic in both directions to halt at Shannon, surely - went the argument, that owed less to logic than Pacific juju - wealth will spread out across the western seaboard. Why, then visitors can come and feast on our native olive oil, truffles and coffee, while planes laden with Chateau Belmullet can stagger back to the US.
The Shannon stop-over was to US sentiment about Ireland what Pearl Harbour was to the way it felt about Japan. Six o'clock in the morning, and squads of burly Clare youths would clamber up the gangways armed with pitchforks, to turf out our slumbering visitors into the dark and the driving rain. Baffled, whimpering women named Colleen, Shannon and Kerry would assume from the bitter weather and the implacable hostility of their hosts that they had been hijacked to the Kola Pensinsula, and were now in the custody of the Siberian Border Auxiliaries. In fact this was Céad Míle Fáilte.
Maybe Americans can buy at Shannon duty-free. Irish people can't. Instead, we would be expected to sway in a trance in the airport for two hours or so, shattered by jet-lag, by exhaustion and by that most evil of things, a premature hangover, in which your mouth resembles the floor of a hen-run. Finally, the Clare lads would swagger back with their pitchforks, and we'd be herded back onto the plane, somehow or other having delivered great riches unto the West.
It never made sense in the old days, and it makes no sense today. But as my hero Willie Walsh was reminding us the other day, the Shannon stop-over is still bloody there. This is like opening a newspaper and reading the latest about the Parnell affair, or about the panegyric by the unreliable fellow Pearse over the grave of that mad Fenian incendiarist, what's his name, Rossa. And oh look, the Lusitania seems to have come a bit of a cropper.
Willie - who should know these things - declares that the Shannon stop-over was one of the reasons why Aer Lingus nearly came a cropper in 2001. In that year, Aer Lingus made money on 10 months on its Dublin-New York run, and losses on 10 months on its Shannon-New York run. Moreover, because of the compulsory, Government enforced stop-over, Aer Lingus ended its service to Baltimore-Washington.
It takes no genius to recognise that something mad is going on here. We nearly sacrificed our national airline for the holy cow that is the West. We are actually losing routes to the US because, for them to remain in existence, they must do the Shannon stop-over. Which is to say, we prefer that we do not have those routes which make money serving Dublin and North America if they do so without forcibly removing their passengers shortly before dawn at Shannon.
We are a small country, yet we insist on having two transatlantic airports, one of which is located in the population-base, the other, as a historical accident, at the first place of landfall where those early piston-engined planes would come whimpering for respite in the early days of transatlantic travel. Other such remote landfall airports - Idlewild, Prestwick, Reykjavik, Labrador - have gently receded into the mists of aeronautical history. Here in Ireland, we can pretend the immutable laws of commerce do not exist, and instead we are apparently prepared to sacrifice Aer Lingus in some weird propitiation of that ancient pagan deity, the God of the West.