I spent the first 12 years of my working life in Aer Lingus, fulfilling a childhood ambition that had been nourished by the romance of air transport in the 1930s, when I had been fascinated by stories of Lindbergh's recent flight, of Amy Morrison and Amelia Earhart, of Zeppelins flying the North and South Atlantic, of flying boats and of autogyros.
At the age of 10, I skipped lunch at Coláiste na Rinne to watch Cobham's air circus performing over Dungarvan; at 11, I was to be found arguing the superior merits of American over British flying boats with the postmaster in the Crewe post office; at 12, I was collecting airline timetables from the Italian tourist office in Upper Regent Street - which I still have.
Since I left the company in 1958 I have followed the fortunes of Aer Lingus, often in recent decades with a heavy heart. First of all from its foundation our national airline has suffered from endemic under-capitalisation, as governments, even when they were investing unwisely in many other less worthwhile State initiatives, refused Aer Lingus funds that would have enabled it to expand and prosper.
From the outset our national airline also lost out because of having a board stuffed with often inadequate political appointees - some of them interested more in free travel for themselves and their spouses than in the success of the airline. And in the past some of the airline's worker directors seemed to me to have been more interested in pushing a trade union line than in the success of the airline - although that has changed in recent times, and until the recent crisis the pilots' representatives on the board generally seemed to have a broad vision.
At a crucial period the company's management proved itself inadequate, permitting costs to rise dangerously, and complacently using the monopoly position that it effectively enjoyed on many routes to push fares up to levels that choked off traffic demand. Thus what back in the 1950s had been a highly efficient airline was allowed to become non-viable.
In office as Taoiseach, the minister for commnications, Jim Mitchell, and I tried to tackle some of these problems, but we were not in government long enough to reform the board - a prerequisite to improving the quality of management.
And given the damage that Aer Lingus's absurdly high costs, and consequently uncompetitive fare levels, were doing to our economy, I eventually had no choice but to accept Jim Mitchell's proposal to license a competitor - Ryanair.
In recent years Aer Lingus has lost even more ground, for although until quite recently it was providing two-thirds of all air services in and out of our airports, today, as Aer Rianta's current Dublin Airport timetable shows, our national airline offers only 36 per cent of the flights into and out of Dublin Airport.
Talking of timetables, since the end of the winter season over two months ago I have been asking regularly for, and have been repeatedly promised, an Aer Lingus summer timetable. Last week I was finally told that the company has decided not to publish any timetable at all! Instead, I was told to look on the Internet.
But when I tracked down Aer Lingus on that system, I found that there is no timetable there. Instead I found a website that asked me a question as to where I wanted to go - but unless I chose to travel to somewhere served by the company's fairly limited network, (routes that I helped to launch 45 years to places like Zurich and Copenhagen have in recent times been dropped), I could find none of the information that I needed as a potential traveller.
By contrast, until March last I was always able to look at the Aer Lingus printed timetable which offered routings to places all over the world, showing how to use our airline to get to a suitable connecting point for onward travel. Now the company has narrowed its sights to its own small network. Am I to presume that in future Aer Lingus wants me now to look at British Midland or British Airways or Air France or Lufthansa timetables so as to find out how to reach my destinations, using those companies' services out of Dublin?
It is now clear that the recent crisis over the pilots' flying hours and hours of rest was totally unnecessary. I don't know whether it was the fault of the company or of the pilots that the airline has lost the best part of 100,000 passengers and €10 million over a holiday weekend. But, wherever the fault lay, it is now self-evident that the minor adjustments to these arrangements that were needed to settle this dispute could and should have been sorted out many weeks ago with a bit of goodwill all round.
The damage thus done to an already weakened airline has been huge. In the past Aer Lingus has scored vis-à-vis other airlines by the quality of its staff's relations with the public: it has always been "The Friendly Airline". And it is certainly true that the airline's staff, who have had to deal with and, where possible re-route, many tens of thousands of irate passengers during this closedown of its services, showed their usual efficiency and sense of service. But the fact that an entire holiday weekend's traffic was disrupted unnecessarily by poor management/staff relations has lost the airline much of the goodwill that its staff had built up painstakingly over many decades.
One has to hope that the considerable sacrifices that all the staff have recently made in terms of pay and conditions of work have now made Aer Lingus a really efficient and low-cost airline,
I don't know how a small airline like Aer Lingus can hold its own against the kind of cut-throat competition that lies ahead. All I know is that because of the fact that Ireland is an island at a corner of Europe, rather than in the mainstream of our continent, we need an airline that will link us efficiently with Europe and with the rest of the world - in addition to our dynamic low-cost point-to point airline, Ryanair, which offers cheap no frills transport for intra-European mass travel.
Without the Aer Lingus transatlantic service, we would not easily sustain our economic success, which has depended primarily on US investment. It is simply not true that if Aer Lingus were sold, US or other foreign airlines would automatically fill the gap. For big airlines tend to concentrate on major routes - and often give short shrift to others.
Finally - as someone who for a decade produced the Aer Lingus timetable - could we have it back please!