Tens of Thousands Shake the Shannon Mud Off Their Boots

Ireland: Tens of thousands - some speculate hundreds of thousands - teamed together yesterday in the US to celebrate the ending of the Shannon Airport stop over. Flags flew, balloons popped, parents with small children wept, all at the relief that this little piece of Ireland would finally be returned to Shannon slobs from which it emerged all those years ago.

At last that enforced purgatory that Irish and non-Irish flyers endured for generations was over. At long last. If only my parents could have lived to see it.

And today as workers at Shannon watch the international flights over-fly them, they have to ask themselves a question. What was their jobs purpose? Could it be, that they would have been better off sitting at home collecting dole or FAS money for all of those years? Did their job create anything other than a major pain in the backside for travelers? Tough questions that don't have to answered because we all know the answers. We always did.

Shannon employees certainly didn't do much for the mood of traveler who was subject to involuntary disembarking along with all of the accoutrements of international flight. Herded, yes herded, into a crowded and barely habitable landing hall come toilet come Duty Free, where passengers were forced to drink coffee and tea as if this was the final stop before facing the frozen wilderness of the north Atlantic crossing.

The slog through a badly decorated, badly stocked, badly run Aer Rianta Duty Free, despite the fact that we'd already been through a better one in Dublin. And then the long lines to get through US Immigration in order to sit in a wind-buffeted glass-enclosed waiting area - which lacked in the basics of civility as practically everything was broken - to watch people do things to the plane that had already been done in Dublin. A noble penance paid for by the traveling public. But for what? How must it feel to have lived a wasted life, to be looked on with a mixture of acidic sympathy and anger by the people paying your wages, as you shuffle about doing work that doesn't need doing?

At the end of it all, the local wildlife will be delighted with the slow return of the airport to nature. And soon, please God, the Shannon stopover will be a thing we talk about to the grand children about things in the days of yore.

Of course the aforementioned crowds didn't band together in person, it was a meeting of the minds over a spiritual connection, but a meeting none-the-less to wave a two fingered good-bye to the albatross that was Shannon. And good riddance.