Listening to Aer Lingus employees provides a surreal and tragic experience, the sound of a doomed reptile on its ice-floe, wailing as a permanent night descends. To be sure, only a brute would not sympathise with them; but as striking as their misfortune is how little they realised, even after September 11th, that the scribbles on the plaster were not graffiti, but the writing on the wall.
For years, Aer Lingus's job wasn't to make money: it was merely to be and to feel good about being. And so it still is for the trade unions. Their interest is in the employees, not in that curious species, the passenger-owners of Aer Lingus, who are in the most paradoxical of all positions. The airline is theirs, yet they do not control it: instead, the airline has controlled them, rigging fares upwards, restricting flexibility and preventing competition from being established. And somewhere in that curious relationship is the trade union, essentially negotiating against the public within a public utility which the public both owns and uses.
Basket-case airlines
Too many paradoxes co-exist here for anyone to make any economic sense of; this is a vegetarian crocodile trying to dine off its own tail. Nor is it Aer Lingus's problem only - right across Europe, we had these basket-case airlines, such as Sabena, which has lost money for 39 out of the past 40 years of its existence, Air France, sustained by criminal cross-subsidies from its government, and Swissair, which recently joined Krakatoa, the great Irish elk and the dodo in that superlative paradise, the past pluperfect.
Yet we have the SIPTU president, Des Geraghty, not merely insisting that the workforce be reduced by voluntary redundancies only - rather like saying to Titanic passengers, "'Course, you can go to New York if you really want to" - and exhorting us to show some "loyalty" to the company, as if we owe it anything. The sad thing is he means it and believes it; and no doubt so too do the workforce, who are convinced that Mary O'Rourke was put on this earth to steal taxpayers' money to plug the holes in all those leaking, circling semi-states, banging into icebergs the whole time. And if that isn't bad enough, so, it seems, is she.
And such holes they are. Ryanair has 1,800 employees and flies 10 million passengers a year. Aer Lingus employs 6,500 people and flies 5.5 million passengers. Sure, Des, voluntary redundancies will sort that iceberg out, no problem.
Internet booking
There's only one reason for any of us to fly Aer Lingus, and that's because it's in our interest to - which is why the other day I actually tried to do so. I have to go to west London next month, and the journey time from any of the airports Ryanair services is too great, and the various competing fares are, for once, much of a muchness.
So I chose to book Aer Lingus to Heathrow on the Internet. It's true that I am about as suited to surfing the net as the Dalai Lama is to give the Spice Girls a few tips on the best way for women to achieve orgasm; but unskilled as I am in the recondite arts of the net, I can at least book a flight - indeed, have done it many times with Ryanair. Now Aer Lingus's hour of glory was come! Except that when you tap in "Aer Lingus" in the little box, you don't have the simple visual equivalent of Ryanair's, "Which service do you prefer, sir?" Instead, just about every mention of Aer Lingus over the past year is crammed onto the screen. It's not so much a website as Picasso's "Guernica" crossed with Jackson Pollock, with maybe a few of Damien Hirst's stuffed sheep thrown in for good measure.
After making a few fascinating little detours into Aer Lingus's history, which zapping the wrong part of the site will invariably take you on, after about 20 minutes I found the booking site, where I supplied details of my flight requirements. However, the site told me that if I wanted to make an Internet booking I would have to join the airline's TAB club - named, I suppose, after the thing that the taxpayer regularly picks up after the semi-states have finished bumping into icebergs.
Personal details
So I entered TAB, giving all sorts of security details, including my mother's maiden name, but it refused to proceed unless I also gave it my e-mail address. Then credit card details were requested, again with more alarmingly personal details. I pressed the "continue" button, and up came a warning in red letters, on the lines of: "Security alert. Information you have given may not be secure in the next phase. Do you want to continue? If you do, you will enter Osama bid Laden's little black book as a tranvestite faggot who works for Mossad."
OK, so the last bit's not true; but since by this time I'd spent so much of the evening trying to get these tickets that I cried out aloud the name of the Thai resort, Phuket, and hit the "continue" button again, not caring if it triggered an anthrax attack in my keyboard.
Some words came up on the screen. I can recite them from memory, for they are graven on my heart. "Sorry! Unfortunately, you have exceeded the allowable time limit for using our on-line booking facility. You must start again." Which is why next month I am flying British Midland to Heathrow for £20 less than Aer Lingus would have charged me.