Though it made no splash beyond the business pages, there was something wonderfully poignant about the appointment. Last year the Government was looking for a financial wizard to advise it on the sale of Aer Lingus. It chose a man called Russell Chambers from the Swiss-owned bank UBS, writes Fintan O'Toole
As investment bankers go he is, I'm sure, top of the range. He also has some very appropriate experience. He was the financier who advised the Government on that dazzling success, the privatisation of Eircom.
That little manoeuvre, according to the Government itself, was aimed at creating a dynamic communications company in which hundreds of thousands of ordinary Irish people would continue to have a profitable stake.
It worked like a dream, the only problem being that we all then woke up to the reality behind the rhetoric: big losses for the poor saps who bought shares, huge profits for the fat cats, a communications infrastructure that has become a serious drag on the economy, and international financiers queuing up for their turn to suck a billion or two from what used to be a national asset. The experience has been so overwhelmingly positive that the Government is about to repeat it with Aer Lingus.
Though you wouldn't know it from most of the commentary, Aer Lingus is a success. In the last four years, it has carried around 28 million passengers - their number increasing substantially each year. It has done this with a consistently declining number of staff.
Over that period, it has brought in an operating profit of €326 million, while steadily reducing the cost of its fares. It has done this in spite of having to compete in its own backyard with Europe's most successful and ruthless low-cost operator, Ryanair.
And this is no fluke. With the exception of short periods when the aviation industry worldwide was in crisis, Aer Lingus has been a profitable company. Nor would this come as a surprise to anyone not blinded by the ideological dogma that holds that State companies must be bad investments. As Paul Sweeney showed in his book Selling Out?, total State investment in all public companies amounts to no more than €1.5 billion. In return, the State has made €8.5 billion from selling some of those companies and those that remain in public hands are worth as much again.
In spite of the very good track record of Aer Lingus in particular and of State investment in public companies in general, we are told that it is now impossible for the State to invest in Aer Lingus and that the company can only get the money it needs for a new fleet of planes by being flogged off to the private sector. Brussels, so the story goes, wouldn't allow it. But this is simply untrue. EU competition rules prevent governments from subsidising loss-making companies. They do not prevent governments from investing in profit-making companies like Aer Lingus. And in fact the State already invests in other airlines and aviation companies: the National Pensions Reserve Fund has put at least €64 million into companies like Ryanair, British Airways, Lufthansa, Aer France, Austrian Airlines and American Airlines.
The threadbare nature of the argument is such that proponents of privatisation have come up with another one: the hole in the Aer Lingus pension fund. There is a hole and, at around €170 million, it is significant. But private companies like Bank of Ireland and Allied Irish Banks have recorded far larger shortfalls in their pension funds in recent years and no one suggested that they had to be sold off as a result. Profitable companies can fix their pension deficits over time, and there is no reason why Aer Lingus can't do likewise.
The strategic arguments for holding on to a national airline are obvious. Bertie Ahern summed them up in November 2004: "We're an island nation, heavily dependent on trade, overseas investment and tourism." A privatised Aer Lingus will end up, sooner or later, as an adjunct to a much larger, foreign-owned operation. The pressure to maximise profits will push that operation to use Aer Lingus as a feeder airline for London-based long-haul flights. Over time, the intellectual capital that has been built up in the Irish aviation industry through Aer Lingus will be dissipated. Aer Lingus has a fine record of technical innovation - it was one of the first airlines to operate the wide-body Boeing 747 in the 1970s, and the first to introduce the twin-jet, wide-body Airbus A330 to transatlantic operations in the 1990s - and its skills and money have fed into the development of other aviation companies here, including, ironically, Ryanair. That human asset will be squandered.
There is another human dimension to this, too. Remember when, two years ago, Aer Lingus tried to stop carrying home the coffins of Irish people who died abroad? It was a perfectly rational commercial decision: the operation didn't make money. But it also caused such outrage that the decision was quickly reversed. When Aer Lingus is a private company, such howling about the national interest will be drowned out in the roar of engines on the tarmac, as a fine history ascends into the cold skies of private profit.