Aer Lingus has always represented more to Irish people than just a quality airline brand
TO DESCRIBE Aer Lingus as just another airline misses the point almost entirely. Since the very beginning of its story it has meant more to Irish people than that.
In an era of dramatically discounted fares and dramatically diminished service, it is easy to forget that, for generations, the airline has stood as an evocative brand, an unambiguous representation of Ireland’s success as a modern and independent nation.
Its cabin crew were impossibly glamorous and envied by their peers, not least because their families could avail of heavily discounted fares at a time when only the wealthy could fly. Its pilots, including the legendary Darby Kennedy, who opened the Weston aerodrome near Lucan and started his own flying school while spending decades flying Aer Lingus aircraft, were always the epitome of cool.
The airline punched above its weight. In the 1970s and 1980s its expertise was sought out by the flag-carrying airlines of newly independent countries such Jamaica, Kenya, Ghana and Cameroon, with its base in Dublin airport used for training by airlines in Asia, Africa and the US.
The airline pitched successfully for prestigious papal business in 1979 and became the first airline other than Alitalia to carry a pontiff, bringing Pope John Paul II from Rome to Dublin and then on to Boston.
It was not the only Aer Lingus flight from Rome that gave the nation something to cheer. It flew the Irish soccer team home from Italia ’90 and was so in tune with the national psyche that it flew low over College Green in Dublin for the homecoming, to rapturous cheers from the gathering crowd. Twenty years earlier it had brought Dana home from Amsterdam after her Eurovision win to almost as much applause.
It took emigrants away from Ireland in the 1970s and 1980s and brought them home again in the 1990s. Even now, for many people, the first sight of an Aer Lingus aircraft with the shamrock on the tail fin at any airport in the world makes them feel they are already home.
And it nearly never came into being. In the 1920s Ireland was too poor to establish a flag- carrying airline and it was only in the 1930s, when minister for industry and commerce Seán Lemass became concerned that commercial airlines were moving into the space, that the State acted. There was still no money to buy aircraft, so Aer Lingus borrowed for its first aircraft from Blackpool and West Coast Air Services.
First there was the Baldonnel to Bristol route. Months later the network was extended to Croydon. The second World War stunted the growth of commercial air transport and it was not until 1946 that Paris became its first continental destination. On April 28th, 1958, after two previous attempts failed due to a lack of funding – a recurring theme – Aer Lingus’s transatlantic service began with flights leaving Dublin for New York with a Shannon stopover.
In the boom years of the 1970s it prospered but in the economically depressed 1980s its fares were famously, ridiculously high.
A change was coming. In the early 1990s, Michael O’Leary took control of the struggling Ryanair and drove prices down relentlessly. Aer Lingus had to respond or go out of business. It responded and now frequently matches its no-frills rival on price while arguably retaining a reputation for better service.
In 2006, it floated on the Irish and London stock exchanges and while the State has retained a shareholding, it is vulnerable to takeover bids. The name that crops up most frequently is Ryanair, which made two failed takeover attempts and continues to hurl insults at the company it clearly would love to own.
