Aer Rianta might insist tearfully that the reason Dublin Airport resembles the US Embassy compound in Saigon the morning the North Vietnamese Army arrived is simply that there is much building going on. Look, it might cry, these problems are temporary! Everything will soon be wonderful! In no time at all, arriving at Dublin Airport will be just like landing in Singapore Airport, with just the hum of silent efficiency to greet you!
Ha.
As anyone who has travelled through the airport in recent times knows, the reason why it is such an unmitigated hell is Aer Rianta. This an organisation which demands a monopoly on airport management in Ireland, yet which is perfectly willing to exploit the open marketplace as an independent trader in other countries. But in its home base, with its trading position assured by its skilful political lobbying, it behaves with all the witless arrogance of monopolies everywhere.
Building-site excuse
Dublin Airport almost defies belief, but it certainly does defy description. Trying to write about it is to attempt to use a rice pudding and the contents of a coal scuttle to sketch a sunset over Bloody Foreland; but one can but try. Certainly the building-site excuse does not even begin to explain the casual confluence at Arrivals of passengers from Britain, who do not need passports, and from mainland Europe, who do. Passport controllers have been reduced to calling plaintively, across the seething mobs of incomers, for all visitors who are obliged to have passports to make themselves known to officials.
This is pathological dysfunctionalism. The examination of passports is not an issue for purely voluntary personal disclosure. It involves a binding contract between states, which is negotiated at the highest levels. The need for visitors to Ireland from mainland Europe to have passports is not a casual requirement, rather like a dress code in a pub which may be applied with discretion. It is inflexible, because those who run the states concerned have decided that they simply cannot allow free and unregulated population movement between them.
And how is that policy imposed in Dublin Airport? "Anyone arriving who should have a passport, this way please," comes the forlorn attempt at authority, bawled over the shuffling thousands. One might as well cry: "All illegal immigrants this way, please." Has the Garda Siochana hit on this ruse to crush the rising crime in Dublin's streets? "All muggers, pickpockets, drunken yobs and racist thugs, please make themselves known to the gardai in Store Street, thank you. Car-thieves, burglars and sexual offenders please make their way to Fitzgibbon Street. And traffic and parking offenders, to present themselves to Pearse Street. Thank you for your co-operation."
Narrow hallway
And what does our undifferentiated throng in Dublin Airport encounter when it arrives in the main concourse? Something which I have never seen anywhere - outside our motorway roundabouts, that is; so I must presume that both have the same designer, or maybe organisational conjunctivitis is prevalent in the public service. What they meet is a convergence from three different directions on the same point.
The Arrivals gates open onto a narrow hallway where "meeters and greeters" (as they say winsomely in airportese) have converged from the opposite direction. But what is alongside this narrow meeting point between people from two different directions? Only the main stairway between Arrivals and Departures, attracting and debouching further throngs of travellers and airport employees right into the seething mob that already exists at Arrivals.
But it's not all bad. For example, people who do not drive, but who yearn to know what it is like on the roundabout where the M50 meets the Naas dual-carriageway at peak times need only go to Dublin Airport and stand at Arrivals. There you can enjoy the same paralysing stasis, the same anger, the same frustration, the same sense of futility, and all for the price of the bus-fare. Moreover, you can feast on the fragrance of other people' armpits - always richest at times of stress - and enjoy the rising tide of Rianta rage as people mill with strangers, missing their nearest and dearest in the marvellous pandemonium that is Dublin Airport.
Where Aer Rianta is in competition abroad with other airport management companies, or where it knows that a regulatory body will simply confiscate its trading licence and maybe feed its erring executives into jet-engine intakes, feet first, with perhaps a reflective pause mid-thigh, it simply would not inflict a Dublin Airport on travellers. It can do so in Ireland only because it knows that the Minister, Mary O'Rourke, will protect its monopoly. Those in the airline business, such as Omega or Ryanair, who have sought to open up competition to the Aer Rianta monopoly have done so in vain.
60,000 a day
Flan Clune, Aer Rianta's intrepid press officer - I would rather represent the US Pigmeat & Whiskey Marketing Board in Iran during Ramadan: "Howya goin' there, Ayatollah, you ever tried this here bourbon 'n' porkblood salami?" - declares that 60,000 people travel through Dublin Airport daily in high season. "An All-Ireland every day," he says cheerily. No, Flan, it's not. Croke Park gets its 60,000 inside within an hour, and out again within another hour, or less. Dublin Airport operates almost round the clock. Allowing it a 6 a.m. to midnight working day, that's 3,300 passengers an hour, or under 60 a minute - about as many who enter Brown Thomas or Clery's in the same period. But they haven't got a monopoly; that's the difference.