Fintan O’Toole: Idiocy of managerialism hits Dublin Airport

If you find yourself going quietly mad in a queue at Dublin Airport, do not despair. Your experience is not, as you may be feeling, tortuously absurd and devoid of meaning. It demonstrates, rather, an important fact of life: the idiocy of managerialism.

As you barely shuffle along, fill your time by asking yourself one of the great existential questions: how is it possible that those who run a public service on behalf of the Irish people seem not to understand Irish people at all?

The meltdown at Dublin Airport is not just about bad management. It’s about what happens when technocracy loses touch with common sense, when analytics take the place of knowledge.

If, during the Covid lockdown, you asked any random Irish person what would happen when it was possible to travel freely again, the answer would have been emphatic: there will be a rush for the exits.

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You knew this. I knew this. Your goldfish knew it. But Dublin Airport Authority, with 13 executives paid more than a quarter of a million euro a year each, didn’t know it.

What we knew and they apparently did not is that the desire to be elsewhere is an essential aspect of Irishness. Wanderlust looms larger in the national psych even than lust itself.

You don’t have to look at statistics to realise this, but they reinforce what we already understand about ourselves. Which is that the desire to sojourn off the island has risen relentlessly with prosperity.

Rain-washed rock

In 2016, when the economy was still recovering from the great banking crash, we took 7.4 million trips overseas. In 2017, it was 7.9 million. By 2019, the year before Covid, it was 8.8 million.

The equation is simple: more money plus the experience of living on a rain-washed rock plus a diasporic identity equals an unstoppable impulse to travel.

The lockdown was thus like forcing a particularly springy Jack down into a very small box. Lift the lid, and it was going to leap out at you.

The reserves of cash built up during the enforced austerity of Covid-19 were always going to flood outwards through the airports. This demand is partly about holidays and our pale-faced craving for the sun. But it’s also about the basic facts of Irish demography – an awful lot of us have families living in other countries.

There are about a million Irish-born people living abroad. There are 650,000 non-Irish nationals living in Ireland.

These are not just figures – they are granddaughters in Sydney, sisters in Poznan, mothers in Lagos, sons in London, grannies in Timișoara. This is the Irish family. It is an institution that requires regular injections of aviation fuel to keep it alive.

Anyone whose head was not completely stuck in a haze of the higher eejitry knew that Irish people really, really missed their families during lockdown. Zoom did not dull the craving for contact – it kept the appetite for physical connection keen and fresh. “See you soon” was our common prayer.

The airlines understood this. Aer Lingus, for example, projected as far back as last autumn that it expected to return quickly to 90 per cent of its 2019 level of demand.

Professional `credibility’

But the €250,000-a-year experts at the DAA knew otherwise. As the DAA’s chief executive, Dalton Philips, told the Oireachtas transport committee last week, “Every credible ratings agency, analyst and industry body had predicted that, during 2022, traffic levels would remain at less than 70 per cent of 2019 levels.”

We’ve been here before, of course, and with much more serious consequences: every credible ratings agency, analyst and industry body knew in 2007 that the Irish banks were sound as a cathedral bell. What chance did mere common sense have against that shield wall of professional assurance?

It’s that word “credible” that gives the game away. What is credible to overpaid managers is what overpaid agencies and analysts – people just like themselves – tell them.

What’s not credible is what everybody else knows to be true – in this case the overwhelmingly obvious reality that, as soon as they could do so, Irish people would start to travel abroad again in large numbers. There would be a huge pent-up demand to see family, to take the kids to Disneyland, to wander in old cities and lie on warm beaches.

How could intelligent professionals, whose sole job is to facilitate international travel from Ireland, not know this? You have to generate a great cloud of unknowing to convince yourself that the “credible” analysts are right and that everything we actually know about Irish people is incredible.

What is the point of having managers at all if all they do is obey what analysts and “industry bodies” tell them, if they are so lost in groupthink that basic, common sense judgment becomes impossible? It would be easier – and a lot cheaper – to run the airport with an algorithm.

And do we not see yet again in this debacle proof that paying public employees too much money does not buy better management? It buys people who are so out of touch with ordinary Irish realities that they cease to understand even the most basic things about the people they are supposed to serve.