Shannon

After a week in America in late May this year, I shall return from JFK to Dublin on Aer Lingus's last flight out of the the airport of the day. Instead of flying direct to Dublin we make a detour barely 15 minutes flying time away. Why? Because we have to land at an airport created by the devil himself called Shannon. It serves an Irish city, Limerick, affectionately known as 'murder city'. A desperately ugly place, which in a sensible world wouldn't exist, its main attraction is its proximity to the Cliffs of Moher and other stunning spectacles on the west coast. As to the airport ... Try getting coffee there. You will be served, but it's the sort of service designed to remind you that we are all sinners and will answer for our crimes. If you can bear to sit upon the unbelievably cheap and shoddy upholstery, take a careful look first, because it's never clean. (Alternatively you can remain in the almost luxurious confines -- by 757 standards -- of one of the airline's excellent new airbuses.)

So why, we ask, do we land in a city just a few minutes flying time from Dublin? To protect the airport from going bust, that's why. The airport pockets landing charges and the aircraft wastes fuel and subjects the already exhausted passengers (customers) to the squalor of this truly diabolical place. Some flights are obliged by law to land at Shannon. It's called the Shannon stopover.

I believe this anti-competitive practice is about to stop; it can't be too soon for me (anyone who actually wants to visit Limerick should get a shuttle from Dublin). I would then like to see the airport vaporised and its former staff sentenced to life terms at the Irish School for Etiquette and Customer Service.

By the way, if you choose to enter the airport terminal you might think you can see hundreds of American soldiers. Blink and then look again. It's an illusion born of paranoia. Ireland is a neutral country so its government would never allow American soldiers going to and from Iraq to coffee there; it would make Ireland an active agent in a war not sanctioned by the UN and opposed by well over 80% of the Irish population. Don't be fooled by deluded liberals.