I don't think that younger people, or perhaps even people in middle age, realise what an extraordinary transformation has taken place within a single lifetime in the propensity of Irish people to travel.
In the years before the second World War travel outside the State was on a very small scale: perhaps a couple of hundred thousand visits were made each year by Irish people. Almost all of these were to Britain: only a very small fraction of them went on through London to the Continent. (At that time the only direct access to the Continent, used by about 1,500 people a year, was by transatlantic liner from Cobh to a northern European port.)
The numbers travelling then were small enough for the newspapers to publish each day the names of Irish people travelling 1st class on the Mail Boat from Dún Laoghaire to Holyhead. If you could afford the first-class boat fare - in fact many people travelled first class on the boat and then third class on the train from Holyhead - you could sign the book at the bottom of the main staircase of the ship, and thus get your name into the papers on the following day - which was very exciting for children.
However, just 60 years ago, on May 27th, 1936, Aer Lingus started its first service - to Bristol. Its canvas-covered five-seat aircraft did not then have the range to reach London! (When in early 1937 my eldest brother, Desmond, was employed by the government to design Dublin airport's first terminal building, the number of passengers carried by Aer Lingus during the previous year had averaged less than one per flight! Nevertheless, 20 years later, his curved terminal building accommodated 450,000 passengers, before having to be supplemented with additional space).
It was only in 1948 that the overall volume of cross-channel travel recovered to its pre-war level. But in June 1946, Aer Lingus, now equipped with 21-seat all-metal DC3 aircraft and already flying to London, Liverpool and the Isle of Man, inaugurated a three-times-a-week service to Paris, and a year later routes were opened to Amsterdam via Manchester, to Brussels, and also, for six weeks, to Rome - using for that route Constellation aircraft that had been purchased for a planned transatlantic service. The Brussels and Rome routes were quickly abandoned, as was a twice-weekly Shannon-Paris service which, I recall, carried no paying passengers whatever in either direction during the three weeks for which it operated!
In early 1948 a proposed transatlantic route was also cancelled by an incoming government, with good reason. As a young Aer Lingus official I estimated at the time that only 20 per cent of the seats to be offered across the Atlantic would have been sold. Thereafter the airline expanded more prudently, avoiding further financial losses.
From 1946 to 1957 Aer Lingus was jointly owned by British European Airways (40 per cent) and the Irish government through Aer Rianta, and it had a monopoly of air services across the Irish Sea. But because it was competing against much cheaper boat services, as well as being largely confined to sub-economic short-haul services and had to handle traffic that was almost nine times greater in the summer peak than in mid-winter, it had no choice but to become a highly efficient monopoly! Bringing that about was my job as research and schedules manager.
Today the peak-valley ratio has been reduced to two-to-one, because of a much higher proportion of travellers on business or visiting relatives and also because we have generated much more tourist traffic outside the peak.
As the 1950s wore on, transatlantic liners were rapidly displaced on the Atlantic by pressurized aircraft, and this opened the way for a successful relaunch of an Irish transatlantic service in 1958.
Since the 1950s the Irish foreign travel situation has been totally transformed. Last year no less than 13 million people travelled to or from Ireland - three times as many people as live in our State. This involves seven million return trips by visitors to Ireland, and six million visits abroad by our 4.2 million population. No less than 90 per cent of these crossings are by air - most of the sea crossings being made by English visitors, for only 4 per cent of Irish travellers now go by boat.
On an average day, 140,000 Irish people are outside the State and are temporarily replaced here by a slightly greater number of visitors from abroad. In the height of the summer these figures increase to around 200,000.
The amount of family travel generated today is huge. Last year over two million visits were made to Ireland by Irish people working abroad or by people of Irish origin living elsewhere, while almost one million visits were made by Irish residents to relatives abroad.
All this reflects the huge reduction in the real cost of air travel. In the 1950s the cheapest fare that I was able to offer between Dublin and London in the 1950s, for those prepared to travel early in the morning or late at night, was £9 return. At 6 pence per mile that was in fact much lower than elsewhere in Europe at that time, but it was still almost twice the weekly industrial wage of that period, and in today's money terms it would be equivalent to €285. Nowadays, if you choose your day and time of travel with care, you could travel for one-fifth of that figure, which would represent about one-tenth of today's average wage.
Half of the people who visit Ireland each year now come from Britain, one-quarter from Continental Europe, and one-eighth from the United States. And over half of the remainder come from Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
The geographical pattern of Irish visits abroad is quite different from that. Whereas barely 2 per cent of visitors to Ireland come from Spain, no less than one-quarter of all Irish visitors abroad travel to that country - which is almost as many as go to Britain. Next in popularity comes France - my own preferred holiday choice - followed by the United States, which now attracts almost 10 per cent of Irish people going abroad.
Given that we are an island, the scale of all this travel to and from Ireland is huge. Over 300 flights a day operate from eight Irish airports, offering 45,000 seats to over 140 different locations in Europe, North America and now Asia. Moreover Irish airlines dominate this market - only one-quarter of flights out of Dublin are operated by foreign airlines, and Aer Lingus and Ryanair are each responsible for one-third of the flights.
Overall, the last half-century has seen astonishing changes in the way we live - but above all in our mobility.