Madam, - Having been "tag-teamed" by those two Goliaths of the free market, Ryanair's Paul Fitzsimmons and ISME's Robert Berney (February 12th and 13th), it is with a quivering hand that I load up my little slingshot with five round pebbles.
First, I am aware of the distinction between subsidies and discounts. One is a hand-out to a state company, the other to a private business.
Ryanair's Humpty-Dumpty use of language on this subject is analogous to its Napoleonic attempts to redraw the map of Europe by placing Forli airport in Bologna and Lyon in St Etienne. It's a bottle of snake oil, and nobody's buying.
Second, the claim that the decision will cause fares to rise may be correct, but at least the only people paying will be those who actually choose to fly, not every ground-hugging taxpayer in the European Union.
Third, if this decision restricts the ability of publicly owned airports to compete with those which are privately owned, then let Ryanair see if it can find a private airport that will grant it preferential landing charges and contribute towards its staff training, hotel accommodation costs and promotional activities, which were just some of the Belgian bon-bons Ryanair was receiving at Charleroi. If it can, then the airport in question would presumably be tax-exempt, since it would be clearly a charity.
Fourth, Mr Fitzsimmons is whistling past the graveyard if he thinks the European Court will overturn the decision. The "private investor criterion" used by the Commission to reach its decision is the same one used by the court and states that any such public undertaking must be guided by the same principles of investment as a comparable private undertaking.
That means it cannot exploit the advantages of public status, such as the absence of the risk of bankruptcy (i.e., it cannot feed off the bottomless public purse) and it cannot take account of indirect regional development arising from the undertaking for the excellent reason that no private investor assessing the risk would give a tinker's curse about such a thing. Since this latter point is the chief plank in Ryanair's case, I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for a reversal.
Finally, my thanks to Robert Berney for dropping the mask of free market superiority by admitting that even if governments divested themselves of state industries, this would not end the need for subsidies. One presumes that in such a situation Robert and the boys could be relied on to take the strain (and the hand-outs).
Of course, exactly why we should pay subsidies to private business to provide public services remains a mystery. After all, such subsidies would first have to pay the shareholders' dividends before whatever was left was invested in the service. A little wasteful, I would have thought, when we already have state companies investing 100 per cent of their subventions in the service. But then, I guess I'm just not as smart as the average businessman. - Yours, etc.,
DAVID SMITH, Harmonstown Road, Dublin 5.