AERLINGUS CAN STILL FLY THE FLAGUNDERIAG

There’s a lot of nonsense being talked about IAG’s proposed takeover of Aer Lingus. That the Aer Lingus ‘brand’ will be diminished, that the Heathrow slots will be a thing of the past, that the airline will no longer be ‘ours’, that the tarmac at Dublin Airport will be painted red, white and blue and that the sky will fall in. (Okay, I made up the last two.)

The main obstacles in the path of Willie Walsh & Co. getting their mitts on our national carrier appears to me to be attributable, only in part, however, to business considerations. The biggest stumbling block as far as the Irish public is concerned seems to be something altogether different. It’s called nostalgia.

Yes, we all have our wonderful Aer Lingus stories. Why wouldn’t we? This, after all, is an airline that has a service record and staff that are second to none. On many occasions, I have written here and elsewhere in praise of Aer Lingus and the way the flight stewards always go the extra mile to keep passengers happy.

Yes, they did bring home our dead and they did fly tapes of GAA matches to New York to entertain the Irish in pubs across Manhattan… There are all kinds of ‘hokey’ stories out there about the Aer Lingus angels and the way they might look at you.

But isn’t the most important thing that Aer Lingus is maintained, bolstered up and kept strong to face into an increasingly competitive aviation future?

It is a modern go-ahead airline, knocked into shape under the stewardship of Christoph Mueller. With Aer Lingus, effectively, you get the best of both worlds – you get good- value flights but are treated like a human being and a valued customer. Which is, presumably, what makes it so attractive to IAG.

But what about Heathrow, everybody says? What if IAG nabs those slots for more long-haul capacity because that will make more money?

Well, if that’s the big attraction, why hasn’t IAG done that with more of its own British Airways slots? Of its existing 300-plus Heathrow slots, around 250 are still maintained for short-haul flights.

Of course Heathrow is important from a connectivity point of view but nowadays it’s not as vital to the Irish flying public as it once was. Anyone flying to the Far East or to Australia these days out of Ireland would be crazy to ignore the Etihad option through Abu Dhabi or the Emirates option via Dubai.

So we’re back to the ‘Oirishness’. We’re back to nostalgia. Perhaps it’s worth looking at Iberia for a moment – the Spanish airline that also comes under the IAG banner. Is it any less ‘Spanish’ because it shares a stable with British Airways? A friend from Madrid tells me it certainly isn’t.

And anyway, is Guinness any less Irish under Diageo? Is there tequila creeping into the whiskey mix at Bushmills since Jose Cuervo took it over? Of course not.

Keep the green livery, I say, leave the shamrock in place, get the business guarantees secured and let’s take Aer Lingus forward, with IAG, into the future.