And on to the vexed question of Shannon airport, which would be a fair enough start to a column if there were anything to be genuinely vexed about. There isn't, writes Kevin Myers.
As a transatlantic airport, it is an absurd anachronism, and it's time that everyone in the south-west realised that its days as such are over. Let's cut it adrift and let it float as best it can, a modest little airport for a modest part of the world.
Originally, Shannon's existence as an airport depended on its remoteness from the rest of Europe. Not merely did it provide the first landfall for aircraft crossing the Atlantic, but it had a nice estuary on which to land the first long-haul planes capable of taking passengers, namely flying-boats. Why flying-boats? Because scientists hadn't worked out how to make a retractable undercarriage which would take the landing impact of a large, passenger-carrying aircraft.
Those early planes, each with vast, wired-wings the size of the Hogan stand, carried only about eight passengers, usually sitting in wickerwork chairs grouped around a table, the women in cloche hats and calf-high skirts, the men in trilbies - but they were true pioneers. By the time they reached Foynes, after 20 hours of their fillings being rattled clear from their teeth, and with engines roaring like dyspeptic volcanoes a few feet from their ears, they were all certifiable, and were promptly carted off to the local asylum, where the last survivors are gibbering to this day.
Then came the the second World War, when aircraft engineers finally worked out how to design undercarriages for heavy bombers, which later served as undercarriages for passenger planes. However, old habits died hard: after the war, both the British and the Americans persisted in experimenting with large flying-boats, and one British company, Saunders Roe, in 1946 even made a jet-fighter flying-boat, the SR.A/1. Bonkers - but that's the kind of idiocy you get when you apply life-support systems to an moribund concept.
Shannon airport was fine for the new post-war piston-engined aircraft, which just about staggered like Roger Bannister to the new airport, bearing a cargo of exhausted, deafened, hallucinating passengers. Moreover, the very quality which made Shannon a good stop-over - its remoteness from the rest of Europe - gave it another allure. Since independence, a central leitmotif of Irish political and cultural life has been that the real Ireland lay west of the Shannon. Thus the west was to be the role model for the rest of the country.
Small problem. This was like making Albania your role model. The west was, socially and economically, the most dysfunctional part of western Europe. Over-production of babies meant dispersal of resources, low educational achievement, no capital accumulation, no investment, high unemployment, lunatic mountainy-men tending two acres of bog with their darling wives, usually a merino/blackface cross, plus huge emigration, oh - and whatever you're having yourself.
Something had to be done to save the west, and that thing was Shannon airport - among, of course, other things. But Shannon was the jewel in the crown of a vast programme of economic incentives, inducements and straightforward bribes for companies to move to the west. The west, meanwhile, pretty much slumbered alongside its uxorial sheep, as Shannon town filled up with Northerners - hence "Clare's" hostility to changes in GAA rules excluding members of the British army and the RUC.
Meanwhile, Mr and Mrs Boeing had changed everything. Shannon was no longer necessary for non-Irish transatlantic flights, so everyone's 707s just kept on going - apart, that is, from those into and out of Ireland, all of which were obliged by law to land there, even when their destination was Dublin. This was imbecility dressed up in the party frock called "saving the west". It didn't save the west, but it did do untold damage to Ireland's economic fortunes. Moreover, it was a classic example of the dirigisme which had dogged Irish economic policy from independence, with the further piety that Shannon was not just the gateway to Ireland, but, with the west generally, to the Irish soul.
The fatuity of the artificial protection for Shannon must have been obvious to all at some level or another; but like preserving the language, the Shannon stop-over became a central sanctimony of Irish political life, unquestioned by any party and transmitted as apple-pie policy from one administration to the next.
It was hokum then, and it's hokum now. Time to let it go. Let Shannon sink or swim. The world is full of silted-up harbours which now sit miles from the shore on seas upon which they once launched a thousand argosies. Hendon, Le Breuget, Prestwick were once major aircraft hubs; now grass grows on their runways or a plane lands every second day. Shannon no longer has any useful, scheduled transatlantic function - unless, that is, Michael O'Leary thinks otherwise. If he does, he'll probably expect the pilot to buy the fuel and make the sandwiches.
It seems unlikely, somehow. Far denser population areas across Europe have no direct flights to the US; why should Limerick-Shannon? It's not as if the tourist industry in the west absolutely depends on the connection. Few US tourists to Stratford-on-Avon fly into nearby Birmingham airport: the vast majority arrive in London and do the tour, yet Shakespeare's home town seems to manage more than just fine.
Like the dear old Saunders Roe SR.A/1 flying boat fighter, Shannon transatlantic airport is now long past its useful life expectancy.
Let us change names and call it Shannon Regional Airport/One: SRA/1.