Relief as plan to pillage Aer Lingus grounded
That seems a far cry from the Hanly Report and a much more conciliatory tone than has been the case, not just from the Tánaiste, but from the Cabinet prior to the reshuffle.
No more ideologically driven agendas then? If they resurface, they could still prove the undoing of the Coalition. But the murmurings suggest a clawback from the hard neo-conservative stance driven by Mr McCreevy and Ms Harney in the previous Cabinet. In the Dáil, Bertie Ahern ruled out an MBO at Aer Lingus and Willie Walsh confessed undying loyalty to the airline, to which he has given 25 years service.
On Monday, Mr Walsh and his buddies withdrew their MBO proposal that at one point looked like it could succeed and had been inspired from some elements within the Cabinet.
Clearly, the climate has changed in that regard also. Ms Harney said the future could see a combination of public and private money underpinning the group’s future.
That’s a far cry from an MBO or from a flotation of the group worth €600m. Goldman Sachs was given an open brief to review all of the options to the group from a strategic perspective.
That was an open agenda, but the belief was that a sell-off or the MBO were the preferred choices among the more ideological people in Cabinet which, apart from Mr McCreevy and Ms Harney, included former Transport Minister Séamus Brennan, who many accuse of being a PD in all but name.
Well, the MBO is dead and the contents of the Goldman Sachs report are still closely guarded.
Whatever it contains, staying State-owned will hardly be top of its recommendation list, but at least it looks as if the citizens of the State will not see the group sold off just because it is the right ideological thing to do. That has been the pattern. Gain was the only motivation for the Eircom sell-off and we know the fat cats were the only ones to make a killing.
So it is to be welcomed that the planned pillage of Aer Lingus has been stopped and a more measured approach adopted.
Where that will leave Willie Walsh and his team remains to be seen.
It was deviously suggested to me recently that Mr Walsh has in effect been writing his CV for Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary.
The duo have a lot in common and a fresh face fronting the most successful airline in Europe would present a less strident visage to the EU and the general public.
Some believe his acerbic uncompromising, indeed ignorant, some would say, approach to his dealings with people has been less than helpful to the Ryanair cause.
Mr Walsh has proved his credentials with Aer Lingus which, with Ryanair, is the only European airline making money.
Mr Walsh paid Ryanair the highest compliment in copying the low-fair no-frills policy, which previously copied Irish American, Herb Kelleher’s, and South West Airlines in the US. Imitation is the highest form of flattery and Mr O’Leary and Mr Walsh have proved their credentials.
It is simply pure speculation, of course, and it is known that the two meet from time to time. Should the Aer Lingus proposals prove less than satisfying to Mr Walsh the Ryanair board might be tempted to install Mr O’Leary as chairman and offer the top job to Mr Walsh.
That may be just a flight of fancy, but anything is possible in what is a cut-throat area of modern business.
Socialist TD Joe Higgins was quite acerbic in his assessment of what the boys in Aer Lingus have been up to. If a private company was looking for 200 jobs cuts, “the air would be thick with gloom and the creation of task forces would be mooted.”
But when a publicly-owned company that would make €90 million profit this year was proposing to “savage 1,300 jobs, the political establishment and most of the media have not raised even a murmur.”
He claimed the executives, charged with “protecting a crucial asset” were “sitting in their offices and plotting how they can make it their private property.” The Cabinet, for once, looks to be on Mr Higgins’s side on this one.
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