As the public and political uproar over delays in the passport office attest, people take for granted their ability to come and go from the island as a regular, cheap and relatively painless part of daily life. While they will accept a certain degree of inconvenience as a trade-off for their security, as shown each time airport checks intensify after terrorist attacks, they expect that the State will otherwise make air travel largely trouble-free.
For a small cosmopolitan island-nation with an open economy and very high levels of international mobility, many people’s livelihoods depend on easy movement.
All of that is why long delays at security desks at Dublin airport, which on Sunday caused more than 1,000 people to miss their flights, are making headline news. Dublin Airport Authority, the State-owned firm that operates Ireland’s main travel hub, said it had sufficient staff rostered to work on Sunday. Some of them called in sick, but the authority appears unsure as to why such chaos ensued. It will carry out a “full root cause analysis”, according to a spokesman.
If the problems are partly specific to Dublin airport, they are also connected to more general trends in the travel and tourism economy. After a two-year hiatus during which international travel was all but paused by the pandemic, the industry is having rapidly to hire new staff to cater for the return of mass travel. They are doing so in an exceptionally tight labour market. And there is a further lag when it comes to security staff who, in the case of Dublin airport, need 5-6 weeks of training before they can work. Delays have been reported in other European airports in recent weeks.
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But while the chaos at Dublin airport on Sunday can be explained, it cannot be excused. Many months have passed since the last public health restrictions were lifted, and it has been clear for some time that summer travel would resume in earnest. It was safe to assume that the last weekend in May would be one of the busiest of the year so far. The airport authority cannot afford another day like last Sunday.