There was a certain elegant piquancy about Aer Rianta getting an injunction against the taxi-drivers to prevent them blockading Dublin airport. For there it was; one government-created monopoly confronting another one. But, as we know, the confrontation did not last long. The taxi-drivers chose to withdraw their blockade, and Aer Rianta's legal proceedings were adjourned sine die.
At least one monopoly - that of the taxi-drivers - appears to be broken, but only by the kind of PD fiat which politicians for years have said was impossible, much as they said it was impossible to enforce clean air acts, until Mary Harney ruled otherwise. But we also know that the PD taxi-initiative was only made possible by the courts; once again, as in so many matters, from legalising homosexuality to equal pay for women, policy has been driven not by our political establishment, but by me learned friends.
Wigged ones
Frankly, we should be grateful to the wigged ones: without them, we should probably be flogging homosexuals to death with knotted rosaries, and women would be banished from the public service and manacled to the kitchen sink the moment the ring slipped on the finger.
How could a relatively small group of self-employed individuals with no particular technical skill, no monopoly on knowledge, no elected representative and no popular backing, hold the Government and the peoples of all the major cities of Ireland to ransom?
What power did they have? Did government ministers use the backseats of their vehicles to have sexual liaisons with farm animals, thereby making themselves liable to blackmail? Does the Minister for This prefer Charollais, while the Minister for That has a soft spot for a brace of billygoats, which she indulges simultaneously while draped over the front passenger seat?
And can public service vehicles be used in illegal blockades of public thoroughfares without the Carriage Office instantly withdrawing their public service licences? How can taxi drivers refuse to pass pickets, and force their passengers to disembark, perhaps miles from their destination, without the Carriage Office vigorously pursuing and punishing such drivers?
They entered a contract when they plied for hire; yet no-one in authority compels them to honour that contract if they see a SIPTU picket a mile outside Dublin Airport and decide there and then to drop the people with whom they agreed that contract, as they have been doing regularly in recent years.
There isn't a monopoly in the world which doesn't genuinely believe that its existence is vital for the public good. Not one. Aer Lingus nearly bankrupted Ireland with its defence of its crippling monopoly, which it gave every appearance of believing to be so morally superior as to be an expression of divine will. Ryanair, as we know, broke that monopoly, which is why it is hated by other monopolists such as Aer Rianta.
True monopoly
It's hardly surprising that Aer Rianta did not take recourse to the courts to lift the anti-Ryanair pickets which nearly closed Dublin Airport three years ago. For Aer Rianta is one of the truly great monopolies. Not merely does it control all our airports, but it controls all services in those airports as well. Among other things, it has systematically used the planning laws to prevent local landowners from providing car-parking space at lower rates than it charges.
The planning laws were not instituted to enable commercial operations protect their local monopolies. Yet this is precisely what has happened around Dublin Airport. Aer Rianta has used the planning process to ensure that up until recently anyway, there was no competition in the provision of car-parking space. Thus it has a hugely profitable car parking operation which charges fees comparable with those in the centre of Dublin, where, needless to say, land is astronomically more costly, and where, furthermore, expensive car-parking prices serve as a socially desirable vehicle tax.
So how else is one to get to Dublin Airport? By a monopoly-controlled bus service, or a monopoly-controlled taxi service, that's how.
Single outlet
Moreover, Aer Rianta has sublet its monopoly to other local monopolies, so that, for example, there is still just a single Bank of Ireland outlet, in an airport which has a daily population of 50,000 passengers and over 10,000 employees. This is greater than many large towns which may have half a dozen banks and whose populations will not need cash in the way that travellers invariably do. The length of the queues at the airport bank is proof of the monopoly, and of the ruthless contempt with which the Bank of Ireland regards those over whom its exercises its monopoly.
What is quite amazing is not that these monopolies exist, nor that they are vigorously defended, for that is the nature of monopolies, but that there is not public uproar over them. There was no serious indignation over the monopoly of Aer Lingus, or Telecom, or the monopoly of taxi-drivers, or more recently, the Pharmacy Act, which forbids, by law, the opening of a new chemist's shop within five kilometres of an existing one in rural areas and 250 metres of one in a town.
Why do we tolerate these monopolies being foisted on us, and protected by the very people we elect to protect our interests? Is it because we prefer to use complaint as a social instrument around which we form informal but agreeable consensual assemblies of common grievance in pubs and workplaces, rather than as an effective tool of change as Americans would? We do not complain to improve, but to have something to talk about.