Gosh, it seems like only yesterday I wrote a news article for this paper about Galway Airport, laying out its possible difficulties with not having full jet-landing facilities on one of its proudest days.

The airport had just landed a twin engine Gulf Stream from Knoxville Airport, in Ohio. The year was 1987. The report said that the jet age had arrived in Galway in the past week, when the airport’s first ‘pure jet’ touched down on the new tarmac along the airport’s mile-long runway.

The 12-seater jet had just flown from Knoxville and was staying in Galway for the next few days while the passengers did business with local industry, refuelled, and went on to another destination.

“The new Corrib Airport in Carmore, a few miles from the city centre, now has a runway capable of taking up to 50-seater jets and landing up to 50 big contract flights. The £140,000 contract lighting, which lights up runway approaches for 1.5 miles, has been awarded to PJ Connolly Ltd from Nuns Island, Galway and will be installed in July.

“Details of the first ‘pure jet’ award were announced this week by airport company chairman Mr C Faller, who heads up the company set up largely by Galway Chamber of Commerce and Industry and established largely to run the airport.

“The last Government put up £1 million in State grants for the airport and the balance of about £0.5 million was financed by generous contributions that totalled about £1.5 million,” the Tribune article read.
 

Mr Faller said that not having an airport that could take bigger planes was a major disadvantage to Galway and for companies that wished to trade into Galway. He said that furthering their development in the airport would be vital to business and bigger jets coming in and using an airport with longer runways would be critical.

Well, there was never a truer word spoken, because people like Monsignor Horan were on the ball, immediately running up huge debt but in the meantime lengthening runways to their proper point.

Monsignor Horan in Knock might have been smirking and bowing, and some laughed at him, but he had a dream that involved longer runways that could land planes like the Boeing 737, which is the work horse used by international airlines like Aer Arann and Lufthansa, which can take-off and land these work horses.

At the moment, Galway Airport because of the length of its runway, can at best, handle 50 seat ‘turboprop’ aircraft and small executive jets, which means that they have a shorter range, less engine capacity and passenger capacity.

Over the years, there have been campaigns to increase the capacity of the airport, but these pleas have resulted with little effect at airport level.

Among the leaders of these campaigns has been former Minister and now Deputy Fianna Fáil leader Éamon Ó Cuív, who pleaded with businesspeople to improve the airport and its facilities, but was ignored by the company running the airport.

Now comes the news that the airport war chest of €1.5 million, which was on deposit in the Bank of Ireland, has been raided by the Bank of Ireland and the company has been left in a remarkable situation.

Now, it’s no pleasure to anyone in Galway to sit down and write about an airport that must now be on its last legs, with the further news that Aer Arann will not be restoring its flight schedule in April. The cancelling of flights is remarkable given that up the coast, and not very many miles away, flights are increasing and Lufthansa, one of the biggest airlines in the world, is increasing its flights to a number per week. These flights will give links onto other major destinations in Europe.

I pointed out recently that Knock’s success was down to the dream of one man – Monsignor Horan – who would not allow his dream to die in the face of bureaucracy or officialdom and whose horizons were wider than everybody else’s.

Well, remember his interview on the tarmac on the top of Barr na Cuige, where a lot of people gathered to see what madman was in action? A lot of them shrugged and walked away saying it was “just Monsignor Horan and another of his crazy dreams”. In fact, his ‘crazy dreams’ were the things that were needed.

The ‘crazy dreamer’ had one slight advantage in that he was living in a smaller community where it was easier to be the leader and motivate people – that sounds like a contradiction; in fact it is a contradiction but Monsignor Horan could take a community by the scruff of the neck and make it do what he wanted it to do, even if it included raising €1 million for an airport.

Monsignor Horan also had the other major attribute of being able to talk to the major shareholders in his company and in other companies and make them do as he wished in regards to scheduling and the centres to which the airport might fly.

We have needed a crazy dreamer in Galway for some time and in the case of the outer bypass road but none has come along, though there are beginning to be signs that this road might yet be built especially with the recent meeting in which Minister Varadkar seemed to take particular interest and brought together a number of local authorities and “movers and shakers”.

We await the outcome with great interest but I wonder if in so many years again we will await the bypass. One shudders to think so and my instinct is the bypass will go ahead within a few years.

And perhaps with a crazy dreamer, Galway Airport would not be in the situation it finds itself this week.

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• John Cunningham, former editor of the Connacht Tribune group, passed away on Tuesday evening following a battle with illness. John’s family asked that his column – which he wrote in the days before his death – appear this week.