Try to put yourself in the position of somebody stranded at Dublin Airport yesterday morning. You waited until Covid restrictions were lifted so that you could be pretty sure your holiday would go off without a hitch. You booked your flights and hotels in, say, the Canary Islands months in advance, but for you and your husband and the two kids the total still came to almost three thousand euros, or something like that. You don’t fly that often, because work doesn’t require it, and you haven’t been on a plane since before the pandemic.
You were aware of the problems at the airport in recent weeks and insisted to your grumpy husband that you get to the airport in good time – and by “good time” you meant get to the airport by 7am for your 11am flight. Four hours. Yes, you’d probably be very early, but wouldn’t you rather the peace of mind of waiting safely through security?
And then, all of a sudden, it’s 10am and you’re not actually in the airport yet. Because the queues are out the door. You see this announcement from Dublin Airport Authority:
Due to significant queues inside the terminal for check-in, bag drop & security, passengers queueing outside the terminal may not make their flight & may need to contact their airline to rebook. We sincerely apologise for the obvious frustration and inconvenience this may cause.
— Dublin Airport (@DublinAirport) May 29, 2022
Imagine the stress and anxiety. How do you even re-book a flight? Is there even another flight today, with seats available? Chances are, you’re going to miss at least part of your holiday.
So, you’re scrolling on your phone, trying to find answers and advice, or even just to share your frustration, and then you see this, from an RTÉ journalist paid well into the six figures annually, all of it from your TV licence fee:
Another way to think about delays at airports:
We are in a climate emergency, since a vote of the Dail in 2019. If you’re on an international flight you are in the 4% of the global population that will ever do that in their entire lives. Check your privilege.
— Philip Boucher-Hayes (@boucherhayes) May 29, 2022
You can’t sum up the gulf between the public and the ruling class much better than the sight of a six-figure salaried RTÉ journalist telling people queuing for 3 hours at an airport for their first holiday in years to “check their privilege”.
I mean, it doesn’t even make sense on its face. The flights, after all, are taking off whether the passengers make the gate or not. There’s no carbon footprint being reduced by a person missing their flight. It makes no difference to the environment whatsoever.
I could, of course, write the easiest paragraph in the world here about hypocrisy: Philip Boucher Hayes is a wealthy man, working for an organisation, RTÉ, which racks up more airmiles in a given week than the average holidaymaker will travel in a decade. But we know all that. We know it instinctively.
Here he is, by the way, reviewing his family holiday in Morrocco a few years back. Privilege, indeed.
Reining in Morocco: A fantastic family adventure in Marrakech and the Atlas Mountains… https://t.co/46UPIKxHDJ via @campbellsuz pic.twitter.com/YxA87myWWl
— Independent Travel (@Indo_Travel_) March 4, 2018
What we perhaps have not yet figured out is the extent to which sentiments like these are class based, and the extent to which the green agenda (of which Boucher Hayes is a disciple) is almost unconsciously understood by its adherents as a class war. You won’t find many tweets from the Boucher Hayes’s or Eamon Ryan’s of the world about the need for attendees at Davos last week to check their privilege, for example, despite that event attracting some 1,500 private jets. Those people were going to the Swiss alps to discuss the climate and the economy and drink burgundy. The people at Dublin Airport were going to Tenerife to read romance novels on a beach and drink sangria. One kind of travel is noble and enlightened, the other is selfish and damaging. That’s how these people think, no matter how hard they protest to the contrary.
And sometimes, the mask slips.
It is one thing to live in a country where the airport cannot be properly managed. A lot of people are travelling on the Sunday of the first week in June? Who’d have thought? It’s another thing entirely to live in a country where, when basic things go wrong, the first reaction of a state-funded journalist is to lecture the public, rather than to seek answers from the people tasked with providing basic services in the country.
This dynamic goes a long way to explaining the state of the country: Consider the contrast between the UK, where journalists shout at the Prime Minister across a street asking when he will resign, and Ireland, where journalists politely ask the Government when they will be putting up the carbon tax. In the UK, the media reflects popular sentiment. Here, it reflects popular sentiment in South Dublin.
I have written before that I do not pay my TV licence. That is because I do not watch RTÉ, and don’t see why I should pay for a commercial service that I do not use. The reason I don’t watch RTÉ, though, is that it doesn’t speak either for me, or to me. Philip Boucher Hayes sort of personifies it: A very wealthy and privileged man, telling a family just trying to get a short holiday in the sun to check their privilege. It’s rotten. The French revolution started because of a very similar dynamic. But then, the French have always put up with much less than we, apparently, are willing to endure.