From ‘golden share’ to red herring

YOU arrive back from holidays to find that your home has been robbed. You go to the police station, where a bored sergeant tells you that there’s nothing they can do about it. You protest, but the sergeant throws you in the cell to cool your heels. On the way home, you get mugged by a gang. As you arrive home injured to your burgled house, your neighbour asks: “Are you OK?” “I couldn’t be better,” you reply perkily.

Such was the nature of Willie O’Dea’s reaction to what amounted to a public dressing down by Cabinet colleagues over Shannon.

The Defence Minister professed himself “extremely pleased” with the outcome of yesterday’s Cabinet discussion on Shannon and, to boot, asked all the groups lobbying to retain the Heathrow service to step back to allow the Government space to resolve the crisis.

But what is the resolution? Was the Government going to force Aer Lingus’s hand? Was it going to use the ‘golden share’ it so mercilessly hyped to force Dermot Mannion and his management buddies to back off? Was it going to abstain — or, worse still, back Ryanair — in a vote if an emergency general meeting is held in October?

Erm, no. The Government said what it has been saying over the past month. The Aer Lingus decision is a done deal.

If you can square Mr O’Dea’s earlier descriptions of “Armageddon” and Shannon being “cut off from the rest of the world” with yesterday’s “extremely pleased” then you will have cracked the mystery that is Fianna Fáil’s enduring ability to be for and against something at the same time.

All those empty stories of rebellion came to naught.

All the Government’s efforts will be thrown into finding an alternative carrier to connect Shannon to an international hub. The Government knows that it will have a full-blown crisis if some alternative is not found.

Politically too, the Government deserves to take a pasting for exaggerating the influence of the ‘golden share’ last October. Never once was it mentioned during the Ryanair takeover battle that Shannon was in danger of losing its slots, even though Transport Minister Noel Dempsey admitted yesterday that possibility was known at the time.

But since about August 12, its line has been clear. Mr Dempsey even stood over his comments back then that some of the claimed impacts were “exaggerated”. He agreed yesterday it would have “some impact”, but he said that some people were talking about the region being devastated.

“We do not want to create an impression that there is devastation [when there’s not],” he argued.

There were some scarier statements, he said.

And what about the Armageddon envisaged by Mr O’Dea?

“It applies to any of the scarier statements,” said Mr Dempsey, lumping the Defence Minister in with those who had exaggerated.

No wonder he was “extremely pleased” yesterday.