Debris on runway to privatisation

This day last week the most smug group of people in Ireland was to be found at gate B31 in Dublin Airport, and I was among them. It was the day of the Aer Lingus cabin crew strike, and hardly anything was moving out of the airport. The departures area which on a normal day could pass for a Black Hole of Calcutta heritage park was airy and serene. The queues at the US Immigration pre-clearance desks had been magicked away.

Added to these tangible pleasures was the abstract but exhilarating self-satisfaction of being among the elect. We were the ones who had anticipated the strike and booked our transatlantic flights with Continental.

As we settled into our cramped economy-class seats, even the loathing everyone feels for whoever fills the empty seat next to you was replaced by an insufferable but almost ecstatic air of simultaneous self-congratulation. We fastened our seats belts and waited for take-off.

And waited and waited.

After a while the captain announced that a warning light had come on in the cockpit. The engineers were going to check it out. After another while the captain fired up the engines to see if the tinkering had worked. It hadn't. The process was repeated. It didn't work again.

Eventually, a good two hours after we had boarded, we trooped off again. More waiting was rewarded with the news that the flight would not be leaving that day. Life had reminded us that, after all, suckers never get an even break.

So the next day, no longer among the elect, we took our places in the traffic jams squeezed through the Black Hole of Calcutta. Then, half an hour before we were due to board again, the announcement came. Unfortunately, the part needed to fix the engine had to be flown in from London and by the time it arrived there was no hangar available. The work hadn't started until that morning. It would take up to 10 hours. The next announcement would be made at 5.30 p.m. It was now 12.30 p.m.

Unofficially the helpful ground staff admitted that the aircraft probably wouldn't take off on Wednesday either. By then, it was too late to get on any other flight to New York, either from Dublin or London. I eventually got an Aer Lingus flight to Baltimore, and finally got to New York at 4 a.m. on Thursday morning Irish time, 36 hours after I was due to land.

IN THE grand scheme of human misery, this hardly deserves a mention, but as an example of where we might be heading it does have some relevance to public policy. For a significant period last week it was virtually impossible to travel between Ireland and the country of which, as some of our leaders like to boast, we are an economic province.

That experience should be a sharp reminder of something we often forget, that Ireland is the last major country in Europe that you can't leave by road or rail. With a huge diaspora and an utterly open economy, air travel is a vital national interest, an essential part of our infrastructure. What we saw last week was a glimpse of where current policies might be leading us.

You don't have to be a genius to figure out that Aer Lingus is in bad trouble. The astonishing range of industrial relations disputes facing the company at the moment may have a variety of individual sources, but they all express in one way or another the same basic reality: Aer Lingus has been surviving only because its staff have been working for unsustainably low wages.

The respectable profit levels of recent years merely disguised a hidden debt to workers who are now calling in their IOUs. The Government has recognised that reality by accepting the impossibility of proceeding in the short term with its plans to privatise the airline. It should now go further and recognise the undesirability of privatisation in the long term, too.

The reasons for setting up a State airline in the first place - a strategic interest in having a national carrier - are not merely still valid, but have become even more urgent. To see what would happen to a privatised Aer Lingus, all you have to do is look at Eircom.

In theory, the privatisation of Eircom was going to create a dynamic communications company owned by a wide range of Irish people. In practice, after little more than a year of falling share prices and public rage, the company is about to be broken up and its most profitable parts sold off to a British-based multinational. With British Telecom and NTL already in the market, it is almost certain that within a few years there will be no such thing as a large-scale Irish telecommunications company.

DOES anyone seriously believe that a privatised Aer Lingus would not go the same way? Some kind of low-cost, no-frills Irish carrier serving the most profitable routes would probably survive.

The rest would be taken over, sooner or later, by British Airways, Continental, Delta or some other multinational carrier. The notion of an Irish-based airline with a broad commitment to providing a specific public service linking Dublin, Cork, Shannon and Belfast to the world would disappear. What would remain is Ireland as the kind of marginal destination where it takes days to fly in a part and fix an aircraft.

You don't have to be an old socialist to believe that the privatisation of key public utilities can be a complete disaster. In Britain, even the Tories are now admitting that the privatisation of the railway network has been a huge mistake. In California, the deregulation of electricity supplies has triggered huge price rises and a furious public backlash.

Undoing the sale of public utilities, however, is almost impossible, as the Labour government has found in Britain. Once it is done you're stuck with it, like, well, a passenger waiting for an aircraft. Abandoning plans to privatise Aer Lingus would not solve all the airline's problems, but it would clear the runway of some dangerous ideological debris and allow for some real reflection on where it's going.

fotoole@irish-times.ie