You have until tomorrow to get your application in for the job of "Director of Aviation Regulator". The successful applicant must have leadership skills, a proven capacity for independent assessment, excellent decision-making and communications skills, exceptional managerial and organisational ability and be able to assimilate a wide range of technical, legal and economic data. Me to a T.
But there is one more requirement for this particular job and it runs pretty much like this: must know how to pull a fast one. Because the job actually consists of the leadership of and protection of our national airport monopoly, and there's nothing a monopoly likes more than the odd sly punch in its defence, normally perpetrated in what is declared, loudly and on high, to be the national interest.
Duty-free sales
Was the national interest not regularly and piously invoked during the arguments over the future of duty-free sales? If duty-free were abolished, we were assured, plague would stalk the land. Moorish galleys, rowed by tiers of Hibernian slave-infants, would scour our coasts looking for tasty natives. Cannibalism would erupt in Ballina. There would be human sacrifices in Bohola. Lesbian acts would be endemic on our streets, and motherhood cease.
But duty-free went, and then what? No human sacrifices, no cannibalism, nothing, not even the eensiest-teensiest bit of public lesbianism. All in all it's been a filthy rotten swizz. So presumably those on high now want a director of aviation who can not merely promise woe and suffering if the Aer Rianta monopoly is ended, but can give a sharp one in the short ribs if required.
Naturally, the one item not mentioned in the job specification is the goal of driving down the cost of airport use, because the one thing that you don't worry about when running a monopoly is cost. That's someone else's problem, not yours. So the person who wins this job must be a whizz in all sorts of managerial things; but cost-cutting, competition, enhancement of value for the consumer? What sort of monopoly goes in for those absurd ambitions?
Yet Aer Rianta has shown it can compete very well indeed in the open, deregulated marketplace; which is why it buys airports in different, deregulated parts of the world, and invests money in them. So why shouldn't it - and we - be allowed to see how good it is at competing in an open Irish marketplace?
I have to say there's one argument in favour of higher landing fees. Michael O'Leary of Ryanair says that with cheaper landing fees, his company could open 10 new routes from Dublin to Italy, France, Germany and Scandinavia. (Admittedly, they are probably to airstrips last used to drop off agents during the second World War, but no matter: who wants the armpitopolis of the modern airport when a runway in the open countryside is the alternative?)
Extra visitors
And, says Michael, with those 10 new routes, he can guarantee a million extra visitors here annually. Thanks very much, but I think I'd settle for cannibals, human sacrifices and the lesbian sex in public rather than have two million extra feet on Dublin's streets, their owners asking, exkoos me pliss, vare is Tempull Barr, pliss?
That aside, this should be a splendid time for a regulator of airport competition to come into existence. After all, Shannon is beginning to resemble Foynes; and maybe, since it was chosen for reasons which are now redundant, its fate will logically resemble that of Prestwick, which came into existence in a comparable location in Scotland for transatlantic flight and which now is no more than a commuter-airstrip.
Yet vigour can transform. Ryanair almost single-handedly has turned Stansted Airport near London into the most successful airport of the seven run by the British Airports Authority. How nice: and how much nicer if the beneficiary of such Irish enterprise were an Irish airport.
Before I flew to London last week, I checked the prices available. Most were ridiculous, the most absurd for a two-night stop-over return being British Midland at £240. Why £240? No Saturday night involved. Oxygen please, nurse. I thought that kind of rubbish went out with the guilds. Ryanair charged just about one fifth of the British Midland fare. Why do people pay the sort of prices that the main airlines charge? Because, apparently, business types prefer to travel with their own class, rather than with the plain folk of Ryanair, Aer Finglas.
Landing fees
Give me Aer Finglas every time. Give me cheap, no-frills, short-haul flights, and no newspapers and coffee that cost £150. Companies which prefer to pay the £250 newspaper/Nescafe option rather than the £50 no-frills fare are companies that are simultaneously booking their plots in the company graveyard.
All the airlines flying into Dublin Airport agree that the landing fees are far too high; but with Dublin the capital of the fastest growing economy in Europe - and maybe the world - the pressure of business and the absence of any competition mean that Aer Rianta can charge what it likes: hence the promised increase in airport charges in the year 2000. This is the sort of monopolistic price-rigging a Director of Aviation Regulation should be attacking. Instead, the new director is apparently expected to manage, direct and protect monopoly: and we, of course, will pay the price.