Aer Lingus has bigger things to deal with as it prepares for its €1.4 billion takeover by Willie Walsh's IAG, but the airline has flown into a rather turbulent personal injury scrap with a high-profile US-based artist who has a colourful past.
Christian Narkiewicz-Laine is a Finnish-Lithuanian architect, poet, activist and artist who divides his time between Illinois, Dublin, his two homelands and Greece. A bit of a jetsetter, then, and a regular Aer Lingus passenger.
He is also the figurehead president of the Chicago Athenaeum, a design museum in the windy city that is a sister organisation of the European Centre for Architecture and Urban Design in Dublin.
“There are few more tantalising names in contemporary culture than Christian Narkiewicz-Laine,” according to the artist’s website.
Narkiewicz-Laine claims he was bashed on the head in 2012 by luggage carried by an Aer Lingus steward. He claims this sent him into a seizure after aggravating an old brain injury, rendering him unfit for work.
At a deposition hearing earlier this year, Narkiewicz-Laine crossed swords with an Aer Lingus lawyer, who asked him if he made his living as an artist.
“I don’t make my living as an artist. I am an artist,” came the sharp reply.
He then outlined how on a Helsinki-Dublin flight he was allegedly clocked on the head by Aer Lingus cabin crew, causing him him to see “blue lights” and have a fit. The cabin crew, he claimed, laughed at him, although he didn’t report the seizure while on the flight. He did end up receiving treatment in Dublin’s Beaumont Hospital afterwards, however.
Aer Lingus, which has been unsuccessfully sued previously by the artist over a cancelled flight, appears to be having none of it. It asked the US courts to throw out the case in recent weeks due to an alleged lack of evidence.
The artist is well known in Chicago cultural circles for serving three months in jail over a decade ago for lying to FBI officers investigating a fraud. He was running the Athenaeum at the time and admitted bilking the Danish consulate out of $60,000 using fake invoices for an exhibit. He has objected to Aer Lingus’s application to have the case dismissed.