It takes a lot for an Irish union to lose the room, pilots have...

BY the time you read this, I will be up, up, and away, off on my jollies on a flight from Cork Airport to a sun-baked foreign land.

It’s a holiday that has been nearly a year in the planning, and I have spent almost as long anticipating it - the warmth on the shoulders, the cool beer, the meals al fresco... and did I mention the cool beers?

Most of us take a second out to thank our lucky stars whenever a hard-earned holiday begins - but this morning I can guarantee I was thanking more than my lucky stars as my plane departed Cork soil.

I was thanking the gods in heaven that we had booked a Ryanair flight instead of an Aer Lingus one.

Because that seemingly innocuous decision nine months ago ended up being one that could have caused immense disruptions to our cherished holiday plans had we chosen differently - and may even have ended them altogether.

Imagine that. The shock, the disbelief, then the dawning misery, that your flight has been whipped away from you with less than a week’s notice - leaving you not so high and dry.

My heart goes out to all the estimated 40,000 people whose lives have indeed been upended in the past week by the industrial action taken by Aer Lingus pilots, through no fault of their own.

Most of us can accept that flights can be cancelled or delayed for a variety of reasons, from weather to mechanical issues, but when customers become collateral damage in a dispute that is not theirs of the making, that really is beyond the pale.

At least 244 flights were cancelled from Wednesday to Sunday this week due to the indefinite work to rule being taken by the Irish pilots’ union IALPA in a dispute over pay.

Thousands of passengers intending to travel with Aer Lingus in the coming weeks now face huge uncertainty too.

Imagine, all those holidaymakers whose trips are now up in the air. All those adventures planned, all that time eagerly ticking off the days... then to be plunged into uncertainty, and even to have those hopes cruelly dashed.

Neither Aer Lingus nor the pilots’ union come out of this row with any glory, and Tánaiste Micheál Martin summed up the public mood when he described as “shocking” the degree to which the needs of the Irish travelling public were being ignored by both sides in the dispute.

Mr Martin is a wily politician who knows taking sides in a row like this will normally lose you more friends than it will earn you.

Moreover, the Irish public tend to have a positive outlook on unions in any row with management, a tradition that goes way back to the views of our founding fathers such as James Connolly and James Larkin. We like to see unions ‘telling it to the man’ and have a cast-iron belief that the workers are always in the right.

It takes a lot for the people to take the side of the company.

However, in this particular dispute, it strikes me that it is the union who have badly misjudged the room.

This is one industrial row in which large tracts of the public are, if not siding with the company, at least finding it very hard indeed to support the union.

This is because we can all see the issue at play here, and it is simply this: Aer Lingus pilots turned down a 9.25% pay increase because they want a 24% rise.

In anyone’s book, these are vast increases to a person’s pay packet.

Factor in that a mid-career captain at Aer Lingus is on €177,365 a year at the moment, and one with 20 years’ experience currently banks a €239,000 salary, and you can see how it is hard to summon up sympathy for the union. The world’s smallest violin, anyone?

That isn’t to suggest that pilots are not incredibly skilled operators who do an immensely responsible job, and that they do not deserve hefty salaries. But it does make it difficult for the ordinary man and woman to side with them when they ask for a vast sum more, especially when their longed-for annual holiday in the sun is being threatened by the dispute.

Taoiseach Simon Harris summed up the anger among many when the cancelled flights were announced, when he urged the airline and the pilots to “sort this out”.

He added: “Many, many, many families across the country have seen parents and others go out to work over the course of the year and set aside a few bob to try and take their kids on a family holiday.

“And the idea that passengers - children due to go on their summer holiday - would be used as pawns in an industrial relations dispute that has already been considered by the Labour Court is utterly reprehensible, people need to step back from the brink.”

Again, Mr Harris was emphasising the two sides in the dispute, but most observers will have noted that it was the union who seemed to act in indecent haste in launching a work to rule, which they must have known would be incredibly disruptive for their company and its customers.

More than a century ago, James Connolly wrote an indignant poem, called We Only Want The Earth, in response to his socialist colleagues who urged caution and moderation in making demands on behalf of workers.

“Our demands most moderate are, we only want the earth,” the poem went.

In holding out for a pay rise that would add an extra €40,000 or more to their annual salaries, Aer Lingus pilots appear to be be taking Connolly’s poem at its word.

I enjoyed a flight recently enough on Aer Lingus, and was sent on an email survey by the company a few days later.

“Thank you for choosing to fly with Aer Lingus. We would love to hear about your experience on your recent flight,” it stated. “On the basis of this experience, how likely are you to recommend Aer Lingus to a friend or colleague?”

On the basis of that experience, quite likely.

On the basis of the actions of its unions in recent days, not very likely at all.