FG's short memory about Shannon

One More Thing:We're glad to see Fine Gael banging the drum in support of Shannon and the west of Ireland following Aer Lingus's decision to scrap its route to Heathrow from the Co Clare airport in favour of a service from Belfast.

Sixty Fine Gael public representatives turned out recently at Shannon urging the Government to force Aer Lingus to rescind its decision to axe the route.

Those with long enough memories, however, will recall a time when the Blueshirts were somewhat more lukewarm in their support of transatlantic services from the region.

In 1948, the Fine Gael-led coalition government headed by John A Costello scrapped plans by Aerlínte Éireann, a forerunner of what is now Aer Lingus, to operate transatlantic services to New York, which would have involved flights from Shannon.

Aerlínte Éireann had acquired five Lockheed 747 Constellations to operate the flights in 1947, when Éamon De Valera and Fianna Fáil were in power.

Costelloe's government pulled the plug on the ambitious plan on financial grounds, and the aircraft were sold in the summer of 1948 to British Overseas Airways.

Ireland had to wait until 1958, when Dev was back in power, for the first transatlantic service to take off from Shannon to New York.

In 1995, the then tourism and trade minister and current Fine Gael leader, Enda Kenny, helped British Airways launch a "holiday programme" to attract visitors to Ireland via London in the hopes of encouraging 10,000 Americans to visit our fair isle over a three-year period.

There's no record of what the then State-owned Aer Lingus or Aer Rianta, which ran Shannon Airport at the time, made of Kenny's decision to back this plan by a foreign airline to use an overseas base as a gateway to Ireland.