Saw clips of Eamonn Gilmore addressing the Labour conference last night. In fairness I like the man and he comes across as cerebral and capable.
So it was a disappointment to hear the Shannon guff repeated again. Jack Lynch would never have ‘turned his back’ on Shannon apparently. Fine Gael have been peddling the same line for months too of course.
There are number of arguments here.
Firstly Aer Lingus is a private airline. It would be wholly inappropriate for any government to intervene in commercial decisions.
And if you do the math, there are several route alternatives. Noone that can avoid it wants to go to Heathrow in the first place and there are direct flights to several other London airports.
But the real rub of the matter lies in a sort of regional parish pump and an opportunity for government bashing.
Margaret Thatcher once said “Northen Ireland is as British as Finchley”. Now I’m no fan of the Iron Lady but she knew where she stood.
Well to me, as to any Fianna Fáiler, “Belfast is as Irish as Shannon”.
End of.
“Jack Lynch would never have ‘turned his back’ on Shannon apparently.”
Irrespective of partition, a true patriot never sacrifices one part of his country for another. No-one in Shannon resents Belfast getting the routes, but for the fact that those routes were at the expense of Shannon.
Belfast International Airport has a greater number of potential passengers than Shannon. The decision makes sound commercial sense.
It was rather ironic to hear Willie O’Dea accuse Aer Lingus of not respecting the government’s national spatial strategy in relation to the Shannon decision. As a private company, Aer Lingus doesn’t have to pay any attention to this strategy all the more given that the Government’s attitude to decentralisation of the public service appears to take no cognaisance oif the NSS.