Eoghan Corry: Sending in the army belongs in ‘Reeling In the Years’ – but it just might work
Passengers travelling through Dublin Airport. Picture: Leah Farrell/RollingNews.ie
Send in the army. Yesterday’s announcement to put the army on standby for duties at Dublin Airport has the appearance of panic, a minister arriving at the check-in desk, flustered and long after the aircraft has departed, having been delayed in the security queue of procrastination.
Why now? The queue crisis, we are told, is partly over. More than 30 extra trained personnel are arriving in the security team each week, making a repeat of the famous meltdowns at end-March and end-May more unlikely.
Queue times climbed back up to one hour during early morning a few times since the weekend, when Dublin Airport processed the largest passenger numbers that it will face in 2022. Mostly they have settled down at 10-20 minutes. Few, if any, flights have been missed.
A triage system for directing passengers into a holding area, if they arrived too early, was heavily publicised and trialled, but not implemented.
The tarpaulin outside Terminal 1, erected after Dalton Philips was hauled before the Oireachtas transport committee, has never been used, and stands — wind-battered — like a monument to grand schemes past.
Like Covid itself, the crisis has not passed. It may even have taken on a new flight path of its own.
The queue crunch experienced by DAA security in March has been replicated throughout the airport amongst the airport, airlines, and the many sub-contracted companies servicing, feeding, and cleaning up after passengers.
Each of them is debilitated by staff shortages and hiring difficulties. More than 1,000 workers were let go on permanent redundancy schemes, but many more left their jobs during the pandemic and have since found work in other sectors.
Every day brings new threats of absence outbreaks and quick-developing crises that eat up standby personnel.
Social media — reflecting passenger outrage about queues, delayed flights, and missing baggage — also fills up with complaints about the state of the airport.
Passengers have randomly arrived at Dublin Airport to go through baggage piled up in the hall with nobody to claim it or no personnel to trace its owner.
The car parks are not bookable for many dates in July and August and have been priced out of the range of many passengers. The demise of Quickpark, due to Covid, has left the public without the use of 6,500 long-term parking spaces that will not be available again until the summer of 2023, if at all.
Covid is at the root of most of these problems, but not all. What drove Aer Lingus into the red zone on Sunday was a series of flight cancellations infected by an older and more familiar virus than Covid — industrial relations trouble at the Marseilles air traffic control towers, which have led to weekend after weekend of strike action (and sudden weather-related absences) every summer since 2005.
There have been more than 360 separate ATC strikes in total when you count similar trouble spots such as Karlsruhe. Air traffic controllers react to industrial action by instructing airlines to cancel a proportion of their flights, affecting Marseilles’ neighbours such as Italy and nearby cities including Barcelona.
A long delay can push a flight crew out of hours and cause further cancellations to flights that do not go near France.
The personnel shortage is shared throughout Europe and North America, where airports and airlines struggle to manage the flow of passengers amid luggage amid staff shortages.
Type “flughafenwarteschlange”, “file d'attente à l'aéroport”, “cola del aeropuerto”, or “flygplatskö” into a search engine, and the results pile in.
This week, Germany considered changing its labour law to help recruit airport workers and meet a 15% shortfall that has caused long queues and cancelled flights.
Heathrow baggage-handling repeatedly collapsed over recent weeks. Hamburg Airport is struggling to find places to store stranded luggage.
Amsterdam Schiphol and London Heathrow have asked airlines to cancel flights because their ground staff could not cope, something Dublin Airport has not yet done.
Irish air passengers have been comparatively well served by their airports and airlines. Lufthansa, Air France, British Airways, and Easyjet all trimmed back their published summer schedules, while Aer Lingus and Ryanair have managed to deliver on their services, with small-scale reductions two weeks in advance.
Elsewhere in Europe, the armies have already been deployed. Soldiers have been drafted in to manage crowd control, but not to handle the business of managing passenger security checks.
A remarkable thing about all this is that sending in the army has turned out to be a great idea after all.
It was rejected out of hand when Michael O’Leary first called for it in March. Transport Minister Eamon Ryan then, apparently, endorsed it in a radio interview last week.
Sending in the army was a standard response two generations ago, as with the bus strike of 1979, previous bus strikes in 1963 and 1975, and the Dublin Corporation bin strike in 1968. Since then, it has gone out of fashion. There was a horrified reaction when it was suggested during one of the last great bus strikes in 2000.
You can see why it belongs more in than in a modern discussion. Army trucks could never replace the effectiveness of a fleet of buses, even in 1979. No soldier will prove more effective than a trained airport security officer. Not in six weeks, anyway.
But the precedent could help solve other problems, further down the runway.
Army personnel deployed at Dublin Airport will likely remain unseen.
That is, if they are deployed at all. The army is on standby for airport duty, and will only be called on in exceptional circumstances.
Should the army arrive — and it is unlikely — the soldiers will probably not deal with the public, but deployed instead to the remote gateposts through the campus where airport workers pass, involved in projects like the preparation of Dublin’s second runway.
This will release up to 100 trained security staff to be deployed in the airport terminal — the part of the operation that ends up on social media.
Otherwise, the only duties they can do would be to augment Dublin Airport’s own redeployed personnel, checking on queues and rushing through those passengers who are out of time.
Or perhaps flustered Government ministers trying to find a solution to a crisis they are powerless to prevent.
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