Bloodlines count for a lot in Irish politics. What would Éamon Ó Cuív be if he didn't look as if someone had dug up the gallant defender of Boland's Mill? The Lenihan line proliferates like Buddleia, Kevin Myers
We await the next generation of FitzGeralds, and their mastery of the bus timetables of Ulan Bator, with a spellbound trepidation. However, we haven't seen a Connolly in a while, and unless he had a love-child during his tempestuous affair with Lady Twistleton-Gore-Gore, who found his rampant virility quite intoxicating, Patrick Pearse is apparently without heir to beguile our current politics.
But who is the ancestor of the Dublin Airport Authority, which seems immune to the ordinary laws both of commerce and politics and bobs up grinning at every turn, no matter how great the chaos which it supervises? Martin Cullen, our Minister for Transport, was transported enough into doolally-land to suggest that Aer Lingus's proposals to build and run the new terminal at Dublin airport were "mischievous".
Instead, he backs the plan for the DAA to build the new terminal - but hardly on grounds of efficiency. On June 26th, after checking in at the Ryanair desk, we spent one hour and 10 minutes queuing to reach security.
There was no management of the queue, which squiggled through the airport for several hundred yards in random twists and turns chosen entirely by the passengers, intersecting repeatedly with other queues. In the chaos it was entirely possible to be shunted into a different queue; and no doubt there are, even now, some travellers sitting in their cells in Guantanamo Bay, bedecked in orange, and wondering how a pilgrimage to Lourdes ended like this.
To be sure, there were elements of management as we approached security, just as there are elements of Strontium 90 in our milk - the element in our case being a nice young man who looked as if he had been given a fishing-rod and told to herd bats. Tempers were not so much fraying as frying: you could have sautéed steel by the time our queue finally reached the dear, old comforting foreplay of a body search.
Last Sunday, returning again from London (for the benefit of the Shinner intelligence officer who has the tiresome duty of reading this column, I was of course reporting to my MI6 handlers), I arrived in DAA-land after a 55-minute flight. My car was in the Blue-Zone long-term car-park, for which one has to catch a DAA bus. One hour 10 minutes after arriving at the bus queue for the Blue Zone, I finally reached my car: two miles away.
This is the simplest bus route in Ireland, terminal to car-park and back again, largely on bus lanes, with no stops between. Yet we were kept waiting for 50 minutes for the return of the bus from its journey into the deepest, darkest Congo of the Blue Zone. When it finally appeared, the driver promptly disappeared for 10 minutes, no doubt to do whatever it is that drivers have to do after spending an hour or even more in that great azure yonder, all of two miles away.
Here is the equation. Stanstead-London, 400 miles, Ryanair journey-time 55 minutes. Dublin Airport-Long Term Car-Park, two miles, DAA journey time 70 minutes.
How is DAA allowed to get away with this? Are there secret heroes in its ancestry that we have not yet been told about? Was there a Dermot Alphonsus Ahern who overslept in his cell and tragically missed his place before the firing squad after the 1916 Rising? Was there a Denis Arthur Aylward who in 1920 led a flying column through the mountain fastnesses of Offaly, and which - shucks! - always missed an ambush by an hour or two? (Otherwise, a splendid unit, as its members' grandchildren can volubly attest).
Was there a Daithi Andreas Anglewick, a member of Collins's squad, who got the wrong bus on the morning of Bloody Sunday and ended up on a rather jolly coach-tour to Glendalough, before catching the wrong bus "home" and ending up in Belmullet? And is that the real reason why Martin Cullen will be "disappointed " if my friends the McEvaddy brothers, who own land adjoining Dublin Airport, present a legal challenge to the DAA's proposal to built the terminal? But does the Minister not know? The family took that form of their name only in 1922. Before then, the name was simply Evaddy, and it was Donal Aidan Evaddy of that tribe who organised Michael Collins's flight to London Airport, on time, as RIC Auxiliaries tried to shoot it down. His brother Desmond Ardal Evaddy had brought in Alcock and Brown a couple of years earlier. Nor should one forget their youngest brother, Donncha Aodh, who safely guided Lindbergh's "Spirit of Evaddy" through Ireland's crowded airspace. (The American changed the plane's name to that of a religious order only after he saw a gang of its nuns giddily skinny-dipping near Dundalk as he flew overhead.)
History aside, there is another dissimilarity between the heirs of the two sets of DAA. One is a descendant of a monopoly culture, and the other is a descendant of a culture of competition. The difference between competitive Ryanair's 50 minutes for Stanstead to Dublin and monopolistic DAA's one hour 10 minutes for terminal to car park tells the same story.
This Government has presided over the triumph of capitalistic competition, which rules everywhere in the most dynamic economy in Europe - except, that is, in the back yard of Bertie Ahern, where State-monopolism rules, and we are back in the 1950s.