Sir, - On arriving at Dublin Airport last weekend passengers were greeted by a sign telling them there was no taxi service. As Dorothy Parker said when told that President Calvin Coolidge was dead, "How can they tell?" A few weeks earlier I arrived in normal hours to find there were no taxis on the rank. Passengers waited for 25 minutes or more before any arrived, by which time the resulting queue stretched about 150 yards.
Dublin must be the only international airport that employs someone to telephone for cabs. As it was, he was missing for 10 minutes, occasioning a passing guard to observe drily, "Perhaps he thinks that the flights are delayed!" When cabs do come, there are seldom enough.
I could get nostalgic for the old days of the UK's "Spanish Customs" (restrictive practices) - my landlords once employed painters and decorators who refused to remove cup hooks "as that is a carpenter's job" - and monopolistic unions which demanded print overseers when there was no longer anything to oversee, and railway footplatemen when there was no coal to stoke (on diesel locomotives).
Ireland is now, surely, not the place for vestiges of this thinking. If hackneys get the right to pick up at the airport, the taxi men have only themselves to blame. It might be a right not easily revoked.
If deregulation comes I shall be, Sir, one of thousands of frequent visitors who shall rejoice at the realism of those involved, - Yours, etc.,
Christopher Nutt, Bancroft Park, Abington, Cambridge.