From top; Dublin Airport yesterday morning; Derek Mooney
This week’s column will be mercifully short. Not because I have deliberately set out to write a short one, but because this is all that is left over this morning after I deleted all the expletives and libellous references to Dublin Airport senior management I angrily included last night.
The other reason it is short is because today’s offering is effectively a follow-up, to last week’s effort as I am again writing how the cost of living in Dublin is slowly grinding life here to a standstill. Indeed both this piece and last week’s are themselves follow-ons from a previous column on the level of street crime in our city centre.
It is not as if most people had not seen this coming. Back in October 2019, in the course of a tirade on Broadsheet about the perils of relying on public transport I wrote:
‘There is now almost no area or facet of Dublin’s infrastructure that is not close to breaking point.’
‘I regularly hear from clients and colleagues about the difficulties they encounter in attracting young talent to come live and work in Dublin as people hear about our spiralling cost of living and the declining quality of life.
‘We are pushing much of this city’s infrastructure so far beyond any reasonable point of endurance that we put Dublin’s future as a good place to live in grave risk.’
There was no great genius to this prophesy. It has been obvious since the start of the economic recovery that public policy makers were neither going to learn any lessons from the economic crash, nor use the crash and recovery to reset the balance between economic growth and creating a liveable environment.
The result is what we see about us in Dublin: a city infrastructure that is creaking at the seams because it cannot serve the needs of those who depend on it, but which cannot be expanded because the labour needed to rebuild that infrastructure cannot be found as the wages cannot reasonably cover the cost of living in or around this Dublin.
It is a classic Catch-22. We cannot accommodate the additional workers we urgently need to make this city work satisfactorily… but neither can make this city work satisfactorily until we can house and offer these additional workers a decent standard of living.
The net result is that failing to find and implement a major shift in public policy to address this Catch-22 will inevitably lead to a steady market driven decline of the city and drives people away until the population, social and economy activity fits our dwindling infrastructure.
Allowing students to earn a few grand more before losing their SUSI grants is not the answer to the labour shortage problems we see all across all sectors of our economy, not just on our trains or in Dublin Airport.
Minister Simon Harris’s announcement this morning is a bit like the little old Jewish lady who upon seeing a collapsed man on the pavement urges the paramedics to “give him some chicken soup, give him some chicken soup”.
“He’s had a heart attack” says the paramedic, “chicken soup, won’t help him,”
“It wouldn’t hurt” says she.
Though his comments and suggestions do not make the situation any worse, they do draw attention to the dire paucity of any big scale thinking across the rest of government and across the opposition too. Perhaps this was a factor in the always ambitious minister’s thinking? We shall never know… or care… but the steady as she goes approach seen from his colleagues is no longer acceptable.
An Taoiseach Micheál Martin was quite correct when he described the scenes at Dublin Airport yesterday was “not satisfactory.” The same can be said of the situation there today and potentially tomorrow. But An Taoiseach and his ministers need to understand that the chaos at Dublin Airport is part of a wider problem that is much worse than “not satisfactory.”
This is not to exculpate the senior management and board of Dublin Airport, who have maintained Carmelite levels of serene disconnection and silence over the past 24 hours. One must assume that the Airport management, which individually and collectively is professional and experienced, also has a story to tell – but why is it not doing so?
While the Airport’s communications team have done a reasonably decent job both yesterday and today, where are the people who are actually responsible for managing the Airport, rather than managing communications?
The absence of any senior Board or the Management team, particularly the Board Chair, CEO or Airport MD, on the media yesterday was stunning. Why wasn’t one of them on the main RTÉ news last night to explain, in detail, why yesterday happened and the steps they are taking to avoid a repeat of those scenes?
They are paid to ensure that the billions the State spent on the Airport is used to make travelling in and out of Dublin by air a relatively pleasant experience – there are clearly having problems doing this… and it is only fair that the rest of us know what these are.
Pretending that there is not a bigger problem, one that will require significant shifts in policy to address, is doing none of us any favours.
Derek Mooney is a communications and public affairs consultant. He previously served as a Ministerial Adviser to the Fianna Fáil-led government 2004 – 2010. His column appears here every Monday. Follow Derek on Twitter: @dsmooney
“He previously served as a Ministerial Adviser to the Fianna Fáil-led government 2004 – 2010”
That worked well for the economy didn’t it
This and also this as to why I don’t bother reading his posts.
An advisor to one of the most damaging governments this state has ever seen is hardly something to be proud of.
Fianna Fail are scum, it’s members are scum, it’s TDs, senators, councillors and advisers are scum, top to bottom every last one.
Fupp them and fupp FF.
Too short, didn’t read.
2 reasons why it’s falling apart, Derek. Fianna Fail and Fine Gael.
And gringo
So many saying they cannot afford to live on their wages but can fly off on a two week holiday as they visit st Vincent’s DePaul and other food banks
FF/FG for 100 years – populist locally focused spending, no sovereign wealth fund, appointing their own to civil service positions… and the whole planning and other 1980/90 corruption… And Lowry etc. still top the pole… so gotta blame many of the voters too for enable it all…
this, all day long and the dogs on the street know it, no need to ask why
Put Dutch or German management in charge and kein Problem.
Not so –
https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/berlin-brandenburg-airport-one-year-on/index.html#:~:text=(CNN)%20%E2%80%94%20After%20nearly%20a,opened%20on%20October%2031%2C%202020.
A cattle prod would sort it out
Frog March them from the dail
Thank god I live far away from the powerhouse of the economy
And such beautiful weather
As Jurgen from Harry Enfield would have said – “THIS WOULD NEVER HAVE HAPPENED UNDER THE NAZIS!!!”
Moan, moan, moan from us little people is how they see it. ;-)
Just pay for the Platinum service like the politicians do and don’t worry about it.
Only €295 blips per person…
https://www.dublinairport.com/enhance-your-journey/platinum-services/departing-service
This government has cut the airport tax paid by every passenger transiting Dublin airport by 25% since 2020. DAA warned at the time that this would reduce in a big negative hit to service quality, but were ignored.
It works out to about €2.50 per passenger, so absolutely nothing worth saving for the individual, but a lot of crucial funding for the airport when its applied to tens of millions of flights.
Its all perfectly in-keeping with FG’s low tax, low service state political philosophy. If anyone missed a flight this weekend they can blame the government’s transportation policies.
You are saying that Dublin Airport is operating on less funding than equivalents else where? That would be worth investigating. I find it hard to believe that they are so strapped that they cannot afford a handful of extra clearance staff myself.
The Dublin airport maximum passenger tax is €7.58 currently..
UK air passenger duty for flights under 2000miles is £13 per passenger. For flights over 2000 miles its £84 per passenger.
Thats an astronomical difference.
You won’t see it being discussed on RTE or in the Irish Times though, because it goes against FG’s agenda and makes the government look incompetent. Its much more politically acceptable to just blame the DAA.
The UK has had similar problems in its airports even if they are changing a lot more for it.
e.g.
https://www.euronews.com/travel/2022/05/09/world-s-longest-queue-hits-birmingham-airport-as-uk-flight-chaos-continues
In fact this problem is Europe-wide:
https://www.euronews.com/travel/2022/05/06/delays-inevitable-at-two-thirds-of-european-airports-this-summer-top-industry-body-warns
It is of concern that I am in agreement with Cian but anyways
https://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/midlands-news/birmingham-airport-passengers-angry-exhausted-24096373
What is going on?
That extra €2.50 a head still wouldn’t encourage security staff to work from 3am for €300 a week as they’ve only 20 hours guaranteed per DAA’s own ads.
Dublin airport had 33 million passengers in 2019. Thats €83million of extra funding that Dublin airport would have had if the government hadn’t reduced the tax.
Do you think this €83million of extra funding would maybe allow the DAA to increase wages and hire more staff?
The DAA literally warned this would happen – it was a cut of almost 10% of their total revenue. Any business facing that sort of collapse of income has to make severe cuts to service quality.
It’s nothing to do with hiring more staff. It’s to do with offering staff better terms and conditions. Would you work for €300 a week?
In 2010 €600 million was spent on terminal two
It was the maternity/childrens hospital of the day a scandalous abuse of the public purse
The whole management must be sacked
No amount of money poured down the drain with these guys will bear fruit
Government must divert flights to the Provences now
BS, more like a chronically inept, upwardly failing “high-profile Christian”, nodded and winked into the CEO role after almost running UK supermarket chain Morrisons into the ground. This is the culmination of said individual’s efforts.
Always someone else’s problem
Meanwhile cork Kerry and Shannon with one tenth of the flights
It’s simple Dublin cannot cope and passengers are treated with contempt
The right wing globalist macroeconomic orthodoxy at work in many western countries is being slurped down with gusto by FFG.
Open borders to people and capital.
Low wages
Housing resources privatised fir a cartel to profit from
Open borders to cheap labour I think you mean? And somehow you became a racist for pointing this out- even though the vast majority of that cheap labour is of the same race.
…what…Delboy…you’ve forgotten loads of your copy…how is this the shinners fault?
And now the Masons have taken over Cork – https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/munster/arid-40884692.html
… you wouldn’t want to be paranoid…
Ce
Jesus I wish the free mason was free here
He charges €100 per hour
Mind you the stoned mason is knocking one out for mehole
Fianna failure fails. Stop the presses.