The Situation Is Terminal

“If anyone knows how to get rid of excess baggage, it’s Walsh,” enthused Business Week magazine back in May 2005, announcing the arrival of Wee Willie Walsh as boss of British Airways.

Three years later, Wee Willie managed to get rid of baggage galore at Heathrow Terminal 5.
Should we be cringing with embarrassment on Willie’s account? Some of us, anyway?
Anyone who has ever waited in deepening alarm and dawning despair for the rucksack to come round on the carousel will know that losing your luggage on a ‘plane journey is no joke. But even so, contemplating the chaos engulfing British Airways’ brand new, £4.5 billion terminal, it was hard not to kick up your legs and laugh. Was there ever such a comprehensive, all-encompassing dumbfounding display of cack-handed incompetence?
I think not.
At the time of writing, four weeks after the onset of the shambles, thousands of items of luggage remain lost, flights are still being cancelled every day, travellers are stumbling around the vast Terminal building distraught, disorientated, stranded. A couple of middle managers have paid the price, been given the bum’s rush. But not Wee Willie. So far, his bum’s been super-glued to the CEO’s seat.
When Walsh was recruited to head up BA, Irish business correspondents were so puffed up with pride that Shane Ross momentarily resembled one of those gaudy birds of the Amazon forest who signal that they are ready for sex by inflating their preening equipment to unfeasible proportions. Here was one of our tigerish, Celtic, can-do guys going over to show the bumbling Brits how to restore the fortunes of what they’d once regarded as their National Airline. Willie was the very model of the modern corporate manager. Hadn’t he horse-whipped tired and flabby Aer Lingus into shape, hammering the unions, enforcing strict discipline, disposing of 2,000 workers (or “excess baggage”, as Business Week would have it) in no time at all. He had now become our national representative in the premiership division of the British business league, sporting the green shirt as he calmly prepared by whatever means necessary to make BA fit for free-market purposes. The Irish solution to an endemic British problem, Willie would show ‘em how to slough off the muck of old State-sector habits, strip out all restrictions on management’s inalienable right to manage, mould the workforce into a malleable mass, create a sleek and gleaming private-enterprise machine to take on and trounce any competitor who appeared in the market-place.
Terminal 5... designed by the enormously prestigious celebrity architect Sir Richard Rogers, covering an area the size of 50 football fields, five stories tall, billowing roof buttressed by 22 massive white steel “trees,” featuring Gordon Ramsey’s first-ever airport restaurant and 112 top-of-the-range stores including Tiffany and Harrod’s, everything computerised, state-of-the-art, capable (in theory) of handling 80,000 passengers a day, 13,000 pieces of luggage an hour, formally opened by Queen Elizabeth on the morning of March 27, with Willie alongside her, gleaming... Terminal 5, symbol and token of the diminutive Dub’s soaring triumph.
Willie stepped forward to glad-hand the first passengers to emerge from the flexible soft-contoured tunnels which are said to enhance the “introductory airport experience”, beaming and bursting with gratification, radiating serenity and joy to the cameras arrayed semi-circularly around him. “Proud, proud,” he exulted with a sweep of the hand when asked how he felt on this most auspicious occasion.
This was about 60 minutes before it became clear that Terminal 5 was a total disaster, filled to the roof with shite.
What are we to make of it all, now we’ve had time to survey the scale of the catastrophe?
It strikes me that, since Willie was all set to claim personal credit for the anticipated success, it’s fair now to blame him for the unmitigated disaster which actually ensued.
If he was hailed in advance as a genius, shouldn’t he be recognised now as a dunce?
If he was to be deemed a national treasure on the strength of the project’s success, shouldn’t he be marked down now as a national disgrace?
Shouldn’t Shane Ross be parading around town in sack-cloth and ashes and apologising to passers-by for having gotten Willie so woefully wrong?
If the business corrs. and their bourgie pals had prepared themselves to party at Willie’s conquest of London, ought they not now be squirming with embarrassment and shame?
The next time anybody tells you that there’s no alternative to private enterprise, that the stringent discipline of the free market will always out-perform the fuddy-duddy public sector, look this deluded being in the close-set eyes and answer: “Terminal 5.”
Willie Walsh? Wee Willie Winkie would have done a better job.

There are few subjects about which more nonsense has been written in recent years than the Northern Ireland peace process.
Every broadsheet paper runs a weekly feature wondering what lessons other conflicted regions might learn from the Northern experience.
The answer is: next to nothing. But sure where’s the column-inches in that?
Still, there is, maybe, a specific lesson to be learnt from one anecdote recalled in Jonathan Powell’s badly-written book, Great Hatred, Little Room. (Powell, Tony Blair’s chief of staff, was central to the drafting of the compendium of lies used by the war-mongers to lure Britain into the Iraq war. His book is about working for peace in the North.)
SDLP leader Mark Durkan complained that the British were giving the Provos undue prominence in the talks only because they had guns. “Yes, and what’s your point?” Powell smirked in reply.
The lesson others in conflict situations might learn from this is that, if you have guns, hold onto them. If you don’t have guns, get some.