Perhaps the most entertaining spectacle in the world, says Kevin Myers, is an EU official lecturing us on the virtues of the free market, as Loyola de Palacio, the EU Commissioner for Transport, did the other day.
"Only genuine competition is truly capable of safeguarding consumers' rights," she declared when announcing her ruling on Ryanair: Eurobabble at its purest.
This is not free-market Singapore, but protected-market Europe that talks: the entity that subsidises the uneconomic production of beet sugar, thereby preventing poor Caribbean countries selling their cheaper cane sugar to us. If the EU introduced a free market in agriculture, there'd be insurrection in France and Jacques Chirac would be in a tumbril en route to being shortened by a greasy head - yet another good reason to abandon Europe's farm subsidies.
It is probably impossible for a Eurocrat, made cretinous from gorging in the high-fat trough of Eurofunds, to begin to understand the reality of what Ryanair did to Charleroi. It was an empty aerodrome, not an airport. Every six months or so a 1930s de Havilland Rapide biplane would land, and both passengers would be given tea by the Panama-wearing airport manager. Otherwise, no one was flying into Charleroi, because Europe's airlines - usually capital-subsidised by their states, supported politically by their particular governments, and flown on by government and EU employees, MEPs and business class executives - chose Brussels airport instead.
Governments were indirectly subsidising their respective flag-carrying airlines this way. State-supported monopoly airlines - the grisly crew of Aer Lingus, British Airwars, Sabena, Air France, SAS, and other winged criminals - could charge what they liked for the flights to Brussels, without forfeiting market share. Losing money on another route because of competition? Well then, increase fares to the EU capital, and help that other route with cross-subsidies, maybe in time seeing off the competition.
Meanwhile, plain citizens of the EU, who were paying for this carry-on, simply couldn't afford to fly to Belgium - a country which, you should know, is well worth visiting. Beautiful towns, excellent food, lovely bars, delightful people, and all very inexpensive - apart, that is, from getting there.
Any European airline could have negotiated a sweetheart deal with the gentleman in the Panama hat at Charleroi, but none tried. Virgin Express even turned down an offer from Charleroi. Loyola de Palacio's ruling that "no other airline benefits from this" is a piece of palatial jesuitry which could come only from someone protected from the realities of commerce. It goes like this. You do a deal with one party; you stick to it; and if it works out, both sides are happy.
What does Charleroi get out of the Ryanair deal? It gets passengers. What does Ryanair insist on from those passengers? That they turn up early. What do the passengers do once they've been checked in? They spend money at Charleroi airport, that's what, with lots of Walloon wallets getting fat. Then, having paid three farthings for the flight, the passengers file on to the Ryanair plane, and spend £150 sterling for a chicken sandwich that tastes like it was exhumed by the state pathologist, and coffee which possibly had caused the chicken to die in the first place, painfully and slowly, in an old-hen's home. That's the economics of airlines: free choice.
Of course, Michael O'Leary speaks an engagingly populist Robin Hood banter. How true is that image? Well, as they say in the business, Scandinavian and Finnish Airways - in other words, SFA of it is true. Ryanair is a tough, tough, tough. Take its flights to Treviso. Some friends did a bit of lateral thinking when Munster played Treviso recently, and instead of going the expensively obvious way through London, they booked their flights via Belgium. The cost of the leg to Charleroi? One cent. The cost of the onward flight to Treviso? One cent. Total cost of getting to Treviso and back, including taxes? €68. Others followed their example.
Then, maybe after Ryanair had spotted what was going on, the Charleroi flight was mysteriously rescheduled so that it couldn't possibly connect with the Treviso flight. There were, to be sure, alternative flights to get to Treviso in time, and very reasonably priced they were too, but only if your name is Magnier, and a chap called Ferguson is no longer on your Christmas card list. Next, once the passengers had accepted more expensive alternative flights, the rescheduled flight was rescheduled back to its original slot, with its new consignment of passengers no doubt paying rather more than one cent each.
So yes, Michael O'Leary is certainly a Robin Hood character - but only in a world in which Jordan is Mother Teresa and Kate Moss is Mike Tyson. After all, this year Ryanair will make €220 million, very little of which will go to the Simon Community.
Moreover, with Ryanair orders dominating Boeing's production line for the next decade or so, he has a gun unwaveringly pointed at the head of the biggest aircraft manufacturer in the world. You don't get to do that by being Willie Wimp.
Oh yes: and he's right on the wheelchairs, even if the Ryanair wheelchair tax is just a little crass. It's the airport's duty to ensure that passengers get safely to the planes. Airlines don't build the escalators or the stairs which mean that people on crutches can't get to the aircraft unassisted. Airport owners do that. Most European airports acknowledge this by supplying a wheelchair service for passengers. Four don't, and naturally, Dublin Airport, run by Aer Rianta - the organisation Michael O'Leary hates even more than the European Commission - is one of them.