‘The wheels extended. There was a piece of dark bogland and puddles. I could see a straight main road, presumably the Galway–Sligo road, and then, as we passed over it, the small terminal building attached to the control tower, and the long runway. There were conifers behind the perimeter fence. We touched down, turned, and taxied towards the terminal building. Under a large D there was a glass door and people standing behind it had their faces pressed to it. “Isn’t it a lovely feeling? I’d never have believed I’d live to see it”, a woman said beside me. It reminded me of arriving once at a small airport in Yugoslavia.’
Thus the writer Desmond Fennell arriving in Connacht Airport, more commonly Knock Airport, later Horan International and now officially Ireland West Airport, in the late summer of 1986. Fennell had written a book about Connacht, a work of exceptional shrewdness and merit, and was anxious to dispel all notions of the western province as a lost, benighted place. So instead of crossing the Shannon on foot or by car, he flew in to land in its brand new, bang up-to-date airport.
The driving force behind the building of Knock Airport was the local parish priest, Monsignor James Horan. Indeed, he might be said to have been its onlie begetter. He was a man of remarkable focus and energy, the kind of man who would have been material for a chief executive officer job in the secular world. He had big ideas, confidence in his own judgment, and was a bully and a charmer all at once.
He was not just any old parish priest. His cure was Knock, Co. Mayo, where the Virgin Mary is supposed to have appeared to fifteen local people in 1879. Nor did she come alone: she was attended by St Joseph and St John the Evangelist. The trio positioned itself on the gable wall of the local church, if the testimony of the fifteen were to be believed, which it was by the church authorities. Forthwith, Knock became a Marian shrine and place of pilgrimage.
This was where James Horan first came as a curate in 1963, becoming parish priest four years later. The original church is long gone, replaced a vastly bigger structure suitable to receive the numbers who now attend. Horan oversaw its completion and it opened in 1976. Three years later, Pope John Paul II, another Marian devotee, visited the shrine on the centenary of the apparitions. It was surely Monsignor Horan’s apotheosis, this, a visit to his distant parish by the only Pope ever to set foot on Irish soil. One might have thought so, but Horan thought big if he thought anything. He now wanted a regional airport which could service his pilgrimage site and bring energy and employment to a disadvantaged area.
He lobbied, and found a receptive ear. In December 1979, a parliamentary coup in Fianna Fáil, the government party, saw the overthrow of Jack Lynch and the installation of Charles J. Haughey as party leader and Taoiseach. This fascinating, malevolent, corrupt and charming man liked big ideas and liked the men who proposed them. He liked Horan. Moreover, he saw electoral advantage in supporting the airport in a region where Fianna Fáil was traditionally strong. Horan got seed capital of £10 million and the work began in 1981.
Then Haughey’s government fell, to be briefly replaced by a coalition of Fine Gael and Labour under Garret FitzGerald, followed even more briefly by a further Haughey FF ministry which collapsed in circumstances of the purest bathos and farce. This time FG/Lab under FitzGerald was back and stayed in office for nearly five years. The coalition partners had no reason to love Monsignor Horan or his airport.
FitzGerald was an urban liberal, a cool nationalist, a passionate Europhile and an academic economist. He was sneered at as ‘Garret the Good’ — to contrast him with ‘Charlie the Bad’, as though ‘bad’ were a badge of honour — by the journalist John Healy, himself a FF partisan from Mayo. FitzGerald’s Labour colleagues had no political presence in Connacht and therefore no electoral interests to defend. The FitzGerald wing of FG and the urban middle-class element in Labour between them represented what passed for social democracy in Ireland at the time; they were emotionally closer to each other — and in truth to some anti-Haughey people in FF — than they were to many in their own parties.
For people such as these, Horan and his ambitions were hateful. An airport in a bog, to service something as embarrassingly peasant as a Marian shrine! And then the huge price ticket for this folly, in a decade of economic crisis and misery. It had to be stopped.
It wasn’t. The FG/Lab coalition comprised in disproportionate numbers those elements of the middle class engaged in non-commercial trades and professions: academics, lawyers, teachers and such like. FF had their fair share of these as well, but their heartbeat was close to builders, industrialists and risk-takers in business. FF had a soft spot for a chancer like Horan, pushing his luck; FG/Lab thought he represented exactly the kind of pushy peasant cunning that was half the problem with Ireland.
And what was more, there was all that Marian stuff, all that credulous, ghastly west of Ireland crawthumping, just what we are trying to flee from in the New Ireland! The government called a halt to funding when the project, now well advanced, was only £4 million from completion. It might have thought better to finish it, despite all reservations, on the simple grounds that they were now so far in that it was stupid to get out. But the airport had long got beyond the reach of rational calculation: it was part of a culture war. In this, the age of the farmer — inaugurated some time between the end of the Famine and the 1903 Land Act — was ending. The age of urban bourgeois rectitude was trying to replace it. The urban liberals hated everything about Knock, even the very thought of it.
Horan, to give him his due, bested them all. He raised the greater part of the £4 million shortfall through private donations gathered from home and abroad and the airport opened in 1986. It is still open, more than twenty-five years on. It still receives government grants for capital development and maintenance but no longer draws a Public Service Obligation subsidy. Taking in this support, it appears to fall just short of breaking even in its trading. It retains the continuing financial support of some local businessmen. Its energetic management is trying to develop an industrial zone beside the airport.
There are four airports in the west of Ireland: Shannon, which is losing €8 million a year, Knock, Sligo and Galway. That is arguably three (four?) too many, given dramatically improved road and rail links to the region since the 1980s. The future looks bleak for the latter two. Meanwhile, Knock and Shannon are engaged in what is a zero-sum game for market share of what’s left. It is impossible not to admire the sheer chutzpah of the late Monsignor Horan and his supporters. It is equally difficult to argue with the boring good sense of their critics.
