Aer Lingus yesterday outlined a litany of difficulties with child passengers when it explained to an Oireachtas committee why it was withdrawing services for unaccompanied minors.
Its chief executive, Mr Willie Walsh, said the service had been stopped because it could not be confident of guaranteeing the safety of children.
Responding to criticism of the decision at yesterday's meeting of the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Transport, he said Aer Lingus had no option but to stop the service.
Mr Walsh said children had been sent unaccompanied in taxis to airports for their flights. Other children were taken on board flights, only for staff to discover that there was no adult to collect them at the other end.
If such lapses were bad enough, parents had obviously assumed children will always be willing to travel.
No so, Mr Walsh revealed, for co-operation from the little ones was not always forthcoming. Certain youngsters refused to travel, others assaulted the airline staff looking after them, and some had assaulted other children.
If that suggests that wilder children treated planes like a school yard, Mr Walsh was not willing to go in loco parentis: "We cannot give a 100 per cent guarantee. We're not prepared to do it because it is too big a risk.
"Knowing what we know, it is too big a risk", he told the committee.
But while the committee chairman, Mr Eoin Ryan, said many of its members had received complaints about the withdrawal, Aer Lingus was not for turning.
