Rational thinking’s dead and gone, ‘tis with O’Leary on the ground

DEPUTY Liz McManus says the time may come when we all have to march empty-handed onto airplanes. She may be right.

The way things have gone since The Yard discovered the gel-and-liquid plot, air travellers may end up crossing the Atlantic wearing nothing but those nasty tie-at-the-back “gowns” patients wear, pre-surgery, with their feet shoved into elasticated blue paper bootees.

And it won’t stop there.

Because of the danger of terrorists impregnating the pages of paperbacks with the explosive gel — they’re now prevented from bringing on board in 7Up bottles, (never mind who articulated this theory on a radio programme: every now and again even clever individuals talk total bilge) — we could face 11-hour flights with nothing to read. That’s enough to drive some of us to drugs in order to sleep the flight time away. Which in turn means that if the guy in the next seat interferes with the wiring in the arm of the seat in order to create a spark to set fire to his free airline magazine, we won’t be awake to notice until the flames start licking up the side of the paper gown we’re wearing.

Who was it said: “This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but with a whimper?” This may be the way air travel ends: not with a terrorist-delivered bang but with the whimper of innocent passengers put to ludicrous bother to force terrorists to make minor changes to their plans.

Unless, of course, voices like that of Michael O’Leary are heard. Not that there ARE many voices like Michael O’Leary. The Ryanair boss is unique.

Which is a relief.

On the other hand, last week, he was arguably the only person, in aviation or outside it, who talked perfect sense, not just about aircraft security, but about the relative success of ostensibly unsuccessful terrorists, when he pointed out it’s quite an achievement for fewer than two dozen currently incarcerated guys to “change the way the entire western world operates”.

He’s quite right. A Martian, looking at the TV coverage of airports all over the world, could not fail to come to the conclusion the gel-threat terrorists had overnight and forever altered the way ordinary decent human beings must behave when travelling. You had young mothers gagging as they sucked from their baby’s bottles under the eagle eye of newly appointed authority figures. You had elderly people distraught when refused permission to bring medicine on a flight because they didn’t have a prescription.

You had passengers forced to jettison cherished perfume and expensive duty-free liquor, not to mention potentially lethal lipstick.

The travelling chunk of the developed western world was, overnight, reduced to ludicrous, wasteful, environmentallyunfriendly and personally humiliating behaviour, padding on board their flights shoeless, beltless and clutching plastic bags as if they were entering Mountjoy, rather than going on holiday or business. Once on the plane, the daftness continued, with travellers watching instructional safety videos telling them how to fit the items they hadn’t been allowed to bring on board into overhead bins there was now no need for.

If those travellers had, one and all, worn T-shirts or carried signs saying: “Terrorists rule!” it couldn’t have made clearer who was in charge. The guys banged up by Scotland Yard were in charge.

They were forcing half the world to change their way of life. They had silenced the usual voices on the side of civil liberties: the people who do the most spectacular protests when the hypothetical inhibitor of human rights is a big democracy, have never raised a paw, never mind an axe, to protest the more immediate, real and present, universally pervasive curtailment of human rights achieved by terrorists ranging from the 9/11 perpetrators to the shoe bomber.

IN this particular instance, where two dozen wannabe suicide bombers, in failing to kill plane-loads of innocents, managed nonetheless to screw up air travel for everybody else, the only voice yelling for the right of the free citizen to continue behaving the way a free citizen is entitled to behave was — God help us all — the voice of Michael O’Leary.

“The only way to prevent terrorists winning is that ordinary people shouldn’t change their lives,” he said on one radio programme. “[We should send the message that] ‘We’re going to keep living our lives the way we always have. And, frankly, SCREW YOU!’” While one wouldn’t want to posit Michael O’Leary as the 21st-century Edmund Burke, that last statement is as pivotally relevant to our times as was Burke’s observation that for evil to succeed, all that was necessary was that good men do nothing. These days, for evil to succeed, all that’s necessary is that the rest of us behave like fools.

The worst thing the gel-bomb guys did to us was make security experts believe foolish behaviour would prevent fatalities. Behaving like fools means taking harmless possessions from millions of sane harmless people because one half-mad zealot, once, misused a harmless thing. We must all go barefoot because one headbanger, once, unsuccessfully (and very noticeably) tried to explode a sneaker on a plane.

Paying obsessive attention to objects rather than the to people who own them leads to incidents like the one involving my mother. Now, my mother’s age is her own business, but you could figure she is not in the first flush of anybody’s youth. She’s elegantly fragile, too. What comes out of an SUV’s exhaust pipe would get her airborne.

Last year she had a dangerous object taken from her, pre-flight: a miniature parody of a nail scissors, less than an inch long, which had popped out of a Christmas cracker.

At first glance, you wouldn’t know which is the sillier: regarding half-an-inch of play scissors as an endangerment to flight or regarding as a flight risk a tiny white-haired middle-class lady who could be defeated by a marauding ladybird.

However, once you went past first glance and applied a modicum of logic, you would realise your judgment should be about the person, not the item.

Scotland Yard’s recent success didn’t come about by attention to items.

They didn’t employ hi-techery to track down every gram of nitroglycerine in the world to prevent a smidgeon of the stuff being used against us.

Instead, they followed the people trail. They noted suspicious gatherings of men of a certain age. They infiltrated organisations likely to host conspiracies.

It made time and money sense. Following the people trail always does.

Because people inevitably give themselves away. Individuals required to behave in ways counter to their nature or beliefs rarely do it successfully. Briseann an dúchas. In 2001, Mohammed Atta’s lads left a rake of behavioural clues, which, in times of heightened awareness, would have led to their discovery before they could commit their crime. The lesson has not been consistently applied.

So, while international police forces are following the people, airport security is following the items.

Which is expensive, time-consuming, bad for the economy of the western world, erosive of individual rights — and utterly pointless.