Philip Boucher-Hayes may be annoying but it doesn’t make him wrong

Another week to be reminded that humans are perfectly capable of holding several thoughts in their heads at the same time.

During the Dublin Airport fiasco on Sunday, an RTÉ journalist tweeted: " …Yes, I am privileged. Very privileged. And precisely because I am I check my privilege in these situations. If I was travelling out of necessity, I’d be livid. If I wasn’t I’d bite my tongue… Another way to think about delays at airports. We are in a climate emergency, since a vote of the Dáil in 2019. If you’re on an international flight, you are in the 4 per cent of the global population that will ever do that in their entire lives. Check your privilege.”

People are entitled to sound off about Sunday’s debacle. A friend who was in the middle of it in Terminal 2 describes raw fear, panic attacks, vicious family fights and people clutching their hearts – all to such a degree that he wondered if abruptly finding themselves contained indoors in a sweaty, panicky mass of humanity, without masks or obvious ventilation, triggered some kind of Covid-related post traumatic stress syndrome.

Anyway Twitter folk directed Philip Boucher-Hayes to go bite his own tongue. They were entitled to be upset at four-hour waits and missing their flights, they said. Tourism and travel accounted for about 10 per cent of global GDP, they said and air travel accounted for less than 4 per cent of CO² emissions anyway. And is it back to the days of the £250 flights to London you want to take us, you elitist git [paraphrasing and summarising here]?

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The elitist stab is an old reliable and this one hit Mach 3 in seconds. “You’re telling people poorer than you to bite their tongues, if the purpose of travel was for a holiday, even though they’ve lost hundreds – if not thousands – of euro [hotels, transport] which took them months or years to save.” The suggestion that getting on a plane was a “privilege” put him on “the same naughty step as the thugs of Davos and questions [his] ability to marshal neutral commentary on RTÉ”, said another.

The next (naughty) step in these pile-ons is when the worst, heartbreaking circumstances are advanced as presumed reasons for people’s decisions.

It’s true that no one has a notion of others’ sacrifices for a holiday or underlying reasons for fleeing the country. Several relatives of mine are relaxing in southern Europe. Were I asked if their journey was necessary, I would answer a resounding yes for a variety of personal reasons. But that doesn’t make Philip Boucher-Hayes wrong. It only proves we can harbour severely conflicting thoughts in our heads at the same time. We may not welcome being reminded of them but it’s that struggle that makes us human and should also make us humble.

Perspective is when we think about the extraordinary multiple privileges of being healthy, free and solvent enough to take a holiday flight in the first place – whatever the sacrifice involved.

Sunday’s scenes would have been unimaginable to the generation before mine. Of course this is about bad management but it’s also about numbers. In 1950, Dublin Airport handled 920,000 passengers. It took 40 years to get that number to five million then just 30 to bring it up to 33 million.

Boucher-Hayes was suggesting that people consider their actions and responses in the context of a far larger, more urgent, deadlier imperative. He is responsible for an acclaimed climate action series, Hot Mess, aired by RTÉ soon after the State broadcaster was obliged to apologise for its “sin of omission” on climate change.

Faced with a firestorm of criticism last July over RTÉ’s failure to connect soaring global temperatures, devastating wildfires and storm surges with climate change, director of news and current affairs Jon Williams put his hands up: “We were wrong not to make a clear connection between recent extreme weather events and climate change…” Science was clear about the link, he said, a fact “we should regularly remind our audience of”.

So Boucher-Hayes was simply doing his job. His Sunday comments were preceded by three acknowledgments of his own “privilege”. But whether he was posting from a shepherd’s hut or a suburban semi, the message is the same. It is the poor who will suffer the most as usual but it’s coming for us all in a very personal way. Three years ago during the hottest day ever recorded in France, a doctor reported that patients with cardiovascular conditions, asthma and eye conditions were suffering horribly. Shortly after came the life-changing global tutorial on the likely link between our global connections and the spread of zoonotic diseases, the ones that jump from animal to human – such as Covid-19. A few weeks ago, an extraordinary heatwave struck much of southern Europe – in May. India and Pakistan have just suffered record-breaking heatwaves. The 20-year megadrought in western US is the worst in at least 1,200 years. Academic firewatchers in Australia say we are now living in a global fire age dubbed the Pyrocene.

On Sunday a teacher and elected Fianna Fáil councillor for south Dublin suburbs responded to Boucher-Hayes by asserting that “the ‘privilege’ of leisure is not something that people have to ‘earn’ by ethically sound, environmentally pure conduct”.

Discuss.