Get off the fence Mr. Kenny.

Over the past week, politicians on both sides of the house have expressed their support and in few cases their opposition to extending full marriage rights to gay couples. Members of Fine Gael, Fianna Fail, Labour, Sinn Fein and the Socialist party as well as Independent TD have all made their opinions on this emotive issue known.

All that is except for our fearless leader. The leader of the largest party in the country. The leader of our government, An Taoiseach Enda Kenny.

Mr. Kenny has dithered and blathered and skirted around the issue. He has refused to answer direct questions from the opposition as to where he stands. He has essentially abdicated any responsibility to let us, the electorate know what he thinks about an issue that everyone is talking about.

This may well be because Mr. Kenny does not support the cause. He might consider that the Civil Partnership bill goes far enough and grants everything that he feels is necessary to same-sex couples and if this is the case, he is entitled, as everyone is entitled to his position.

But he is a politician, and his job is to take a stand on issues. Especially an issue that is in the public eye. This is how the electorate decide on whether or not they want to vote for a politician, by assessing whether the opinions and beliefs of the politician are in line with their own opinions and beliefs. Mr. Kenny clearly doesn’t want to make his opinion on this matter public, as he is fearful that he will appear to be on the other side of the argument as the majority of the population.

To say that this is disappointing and worrying is a massive understatement. To have a Taoiseach that is afraid of getting off the fence for fear of losing votes, or ruffling feathers or for whatever reason is a huge worry for a country that is going through the massive upheaval that Ireland is currently experiencing.

Has Mr. Kenny no backbone? Is he unable to state his own personal opinion? What does this say about his ability to make his opinions and his beliefs and his desires known in the rest of his job. What does this mean about his ability to conduct negotiations regarding Ireland’s fiscal situation with the other members of the EU? With the banks? With the bondholders.

I don’t care if you don’t agree with me Mr. Kenny. I do care that you are too chicken to come out and make your position known.

If it wasn’t such a serious issue, it would remind me of an old joke.

Why did Enda Kenny cross the road? To get to the middle.

If you need blood, I have some and I am quite willing to part with it.

Today on twitter I noticed a tweet from the Irish Blood Transfusion Services stating that the supplies of O+, O-, B+ and B- that the IBTS have on hand had dropped below 3 days supply and that they desperately needed donations to ensure that if someone with those blood groups was unfortunate enough to require a transfusion that there would be adequate supply to service this requirement.

The IBTS is a brilliant service that has saved countless lives over the last 50 odd years since it was founded in 1965. It exemplifies the very best in human nature, namely the willingness of people to give freely OF THEMSELVES, for no personal gain but rather to aid and support the ability of our hospitals to save the lives of people in need.

When I was a child my father was a blood donor. He gave blood regularly and I remember as a small child the gold drop pin that he was given after reaching a specific number of donations. From as early as I can remember I was convinced that I too, on reaching the age of majority would follow my fathers example and donate blood on a regular basis.

When I was 18 years of age, as I started university I duly made my way to the exam hall in TCD during my very first freshers week in order to make my very first of what I thought would be a lifetime of donations. When I reached the door of the exam hall however I was stopped in my tracks by the large sign that had been erected outside the hall.

On it, the IBTS had outlined a list of people who were NOT eligible under their rules to donate blood. Right down the bottom, to my disappointment, and I will confess shame, was a category to which I quite obviously belonged.

“Any man who has had sexual relations with another man”

As I have already stated unequivocally on this site, I am a gay man.

I first had sex with another man in the late 1980′s when I was in my late teens. This was the age of AIDS hysteria, and being the kind of person to worry incessantly about the tiniest little thing regarding my health, I had made certain that any sexual relations that I had followed the most stringent safety procedures. This might make me sound a little clinical, but today I don’t think people fully realise the fear and hysteria that surrounded the gay community and AIDS back in the late 1980′s. This was a disease that killed people. Gay people. There was no cure, and anyone could get it. To make things even more horrific, you got it doing what came naturally, namely getting your rocks off. To say that I was scared shitless of AIDS and HIV would be a massive understatement.

As a result, I always used protection. I researched as much information as I could get my hands on about the virus, and I never participated in any activity that could be considered dangerous. I regularly visited a GUM (Genito-Urinary Medicine) clinic in James’ Hospital to be regularly tested for HIV and other STD’s and was extremely relieved every time that the result came back negative. Although I practiced safe-sex, the hypochondriac in me always worked overtime, and until I got that negative test result, it always weighed heavily on my mind.

As a result, when I saw that sign outside the temporary donation centre on my first week in college, I was disappointed, but I wasn’t really that surprised. I realised that my sexual activity did expose me to a heightened risk, and as at that time detection techniques were significantly more involved and complex, requiring a blood sample to be sent away to a specialist laboratory, it was somewhat understandable that the IBTS ruled my community out as a matter of course.

That was more than 20 years ago. During those 20 years astonishing progress has been made in the detection and treatment of HIV. People today have a much better understanding of the virus and tests now exist that can give a preliminary result within a couple of minutes, rather than the couple of weeks that it took 20 years ago.

As a result of these advances, and the excellent information campaigns that successive governments all around the world have undertaken to inform and educate their citizens, the chances of “dying through ignorance” as one of the most well publicised of these campaigns warned has been greatly reduced. As long as you follow a few easily understood and easily achieved guidelines, it is very easy to ensure that you never expose yourself to dangerous sexual activity.

I have been in a committed relationship with my partner for 17 years. As a result the level of risk that I pose as a gay man is SIGNIFICANTLY less than many straight people who still continue to engage in risky sexual activity. In 1999 the level of HIV infections acquired through heterosexual behavior in the UK exceeded that of HIV acquired through homosexual activity for the first time and has continued to rise year on year. Today statistics show that heterosexuals are much more likely to get infected than homosexuals. I realise that this is a somewhat misleading statistic as the number of heterosexual people greatly outnumbers the number of homosexual people, but the fact remains that in no small part due to the ravaging effects of HIV on the gay community in the late 1980′s and the early 1990′s, the gay community has always been much more aware of the dangers of HIV and as a result is more likely to be better educated about what constitutes safe versus risky behaviour. That being said, it is with rising concern that some reports now appear to show that after falling to an all time low in late 1990′s and the early 2000′s the rate of HIV infection in homosexuals is now on the rise again. It appears as though the campaign to educate the gay community about the risks of unprotected sex was so successful that a small proportion of the community is of the opinion that the danger no longer exists.

Regardless of this worrying statistic however, I, and many of my friends are of the opinion that the policy of the IBTS to automatically give a lifetime ban to all homosexual men from donating blood is both discriminatory and also extremely short sighted. As is clear from today’s tweet by the IBTS, the service needs donors. It needs blood, and it really cannot afford to exclude perfectly healthy potential donors based on an outdated policy.

In fact, the UK’s National Blood Service, which had the same policy as the IBTS decided after a full review to make a change to their policy last September in order to allow gay men to become donors as long as they had not engaged in gay sex during the previous year, with a member of the Advisory Committee on the Safety of Blood, Tissues and Organs, Professor Deirdre Kelly stating that

…there had been advances in the testing of donated blood which had significantly reduced the chance of errors and had reduced the size of the “window period”.

She said the data showed that “the risk from a 12-month deferral was equivalent to permanent deferral” so “the evidence does not support the maintenance of a permanent ban“.

Now this is still not a perfect solution, as it essentially requires that potential donors are celibate for a calendar year before they donate. As has been pointed out by a number of action groups, this is unfairly discriminatory towards gay men as it places tighter controls on low risk gay men than it does on straight men who engage in high risk sexual activities.

As pointed out by the chief executive of Stonewall the gay advocacy group, Ben Summerskil:

A gay man in a monogamous relationship who has only had oral sex will still automatically be unable to give blood but a heterosexual man who has had multiple partners and not worn a condom will not be questioned about his behaviour, or even then, excluded

Despite this move by the UK body, the IBTS indicated that it had no plans to change its regulations, and that it would keep its blanket ban on MSM (Men who have sex with other men) in place.

Now it is clear that the IBTS has a responsibility to ensure that the blood that it provides to hospitals is free from infection, and unfortunately their history in this regard is somewhat chequered, but it is also clear that the supply of blood that is required on a daily basis is regularly outstripping demand.

The IBTS needs to ensure that its donors are as healthy and free from infection as they possibly can be, but their current policy is flawed as it discriminates against gay men just because they are gay, and not because they are proven to be the most high risk group.

I am a gay man. I am in a long term, stable relationship. I do not engage in risky behaviour and I am free from disease and as part of my regular health checkups get tested to ensure that this is the case. I have blood and I am willing donate it to this service.

Can the IBTS really afford to refuse to accept it?

The best defence against hatred is education…right? Not necessarily.

When I was first coming to terms with my sexuality, I clung to the truism that the hatred that is homophobia, and in fact all kinds of hatred was born out of ignorance. That the people who shouted fag, or homo, or queer at me in school, or in the street were just not educated, and it was this very ignorance of the fact that there were differences in people and cultures around the world that fuelled their own hatred.

As I grew older, and as I began to be exposed to people from different backgrounds and different cultures, even those within the small country I call my own, I realised that in fact I had been mistaken. I knew plenty of people who on first impression were intelligent, well educated and worldly that ultimately proved themselves to be the most homophobic people I had ever met.

People who had degrees, primary degrees, secondary degrees and even PhD’s who had the most retarded sense of equality I had ever seen. People who constituted the intelligentsia of Ireland, those who literally ruled our existence, were the ones in our society who had the most medieval attitude toward sexuality.

Equally I met people who were working class, had little if any further education and had no experience of the world outside our own parochial country, who couldn’t give a damn about who I jumped into bed with, and realised that love was a feeling shared by two people and that it didn’t matter whether those two people had compatible sexual organs or not.

One of my closest friends when I was growing up came from a very well to do, and successful Dublin professional family. A family of highly educated professional people. Wealthy, powerful and ostensibly intelligent people who had benefited from every educational opportunity available in this country. The best private schools, the best universities and postgraduate educations. The opportunity to travel and experience life beyond our shores.

It then came as a huge surprise to find that these people were exactly those who rejected me completely when I, with enormous trepidation made my first tentative steps toward being who I really was.

As soon as it became known that Leo was a ‘fag’, they completely cut me out of their lives. There had always been rumours of course, rumblings that all was not normal but once I actually plucked up enough courage to confront my demons and admit who I was, this family wanted nothing more to do with me.

I dealt with this as best I could. I told myself that it was going to be a while before the reality was accepted by everyone in my life, but I consoled myself that it would eventually happen, and that people who I had considered family for all of my life would eventually accept who I was and that normality would reign once more.

I was deluded.

20 years on, I very rarely encounter these people. I run into them now and then at funerals, and very occasionally at sporting events and those meetings could not be colder. A perfunctory greeting and nothing more. An outcome that admittedly is gratifying as much to me as I am sure that it is to them.

Before today I have thought very little about this. I buried it and didn’t discuss it with anyone else. I have effectively shut this particular episode in my life away, put it down to experience and moved on with my life. I have been in a very healthy and loving relationship with a man who represents the very best that a good education and moderate liberal upbringing can produce. I am extraordinarily lucky.

Unfortunately today, nearly 20 years after I first confronted the difficult decision in my life to be who I am, rather than to be who society would prefer me to be, I am horrified to realise that our society is not much better today than it was back then. There are still entire sections of our society who whilst ostensibly intelligent and well educated still consider homosexuality to be an aberration, and one that should be tolerated only for the sake of political correctness.

These are the same people who spread, and perpetuated the whisperings about Senator David Norris. That although there was no proof of his ever having displayed any such tendencies, his plea for clemency for an ex lover obviously indicated that he was a proponent of child molestation.

That his opinion that pederasty; the idea that an older man could provide guidance and education to a younger man, not in the sexual sense, but in the life lessons sense, had some merit, obviously meant that he was interested in taking every blond haired, blue eyed, 10 year old boy and doing unspeakable things to them.

In short, that as a gay man, he was in fact a child molester and paedophile at heart.

This despite the fact that at every turn, the unimpeachable character of Senator David Norris has shown him to be a champion of human rights, a crusader for the weak and disenfranchised and the very model of an educator and shepherd of young minds.

The fact that he was gay, and the fact that he had made an attempt to plead for clemency for a loved one, something that any mother, father, husband, wife, or friend in this country would do for a loved one, meant that in the minds of a certain section of the Irish electorate, he was eternally tainted.

It came as no surprise that these whisperings were made about David; it also came as no surprise that those whisperings were started within the ranks of the ‘intelligentsia’ in the nation. That it was lawyers, doctors, architects, politicians and most tellingly journalists who were tut-tutting about the homo and his frankly disgusting and dangerous views.

A further example of this homophobia was printed in one of the papers of record of this small nation of ours at the weekend. A newspaper that prides itself as having one of the largest circulations in the country. A newspaper, which is considered by many as THE Sunday newspaper.

It was by an author.

A man who has a couple of acclaimed novels to his name.

A man who was Auditor of the Literary and Historical Society in UCD during his university education. A society dedicated to debate and discussion, to the sharing and dissemination of ideas.

A man who was a diplomat for the Irish nation, who literally managed the relationship that our country has with the rest of the world.

A man who thereafter was the editor of Magill, a magazine considered to be one of the most groundbreaking in terms of moulding public opinion and providing investigative articles and colourful reportage in the Irish market.

This stalwart of the educated class, this champion of further education, this privileged progenitor of Ireland’s literary present and future presented to the country, in the nations favourite Sunday read, an article that represented the very worst type of hypocritical claptrap, scaremongering and incitement to hatred that I have ever had the misfortune to read.

However, as I read the article, I began to realise that it was all beginning to sound a little familiar. Horribly familiar.

What Mr. Delaney wants, what he was making quite clear in his ‘article’ is exactly the same thing that my ex-friends from 20 years ago wanted. What the stirrers who effectively torpedoed David Norris’s presidential hopes had wanted. He wanted us to be quiet.

He realises that we exist, but he would really prefer if we did not to pollute his existence with our constant demands for attention. Our constant ridiculous pleading to be considered normal. Our constant and irritatingly well publicised demands for equality.

Despite Mr. Delaney’s clichéd claim that

‘some of my best friends are gay’,

what he really meant to say was that

‘some of the people I know are disgusting homos, and I have to put up with them, because that is what society today demands, but really I would much rather if they would just be quiet so that I don’t have to imagine the perverted shenanigans that they might possibly get up to in the privacy of their own bedrooms’

Now, this from someone who had no education, or no experience beyond their own lives I might have been able to at least understand the reason for such a viewpoint.

From a man whose university education, career in the diplomatic corps and subsequent career among reputedly intelligent and open minded journalists would classify him as a member of the most privileged and rarefied strata of our society it is an absolute shocking example of how intelligence and education does not necessarily afford you any humanity.

Eamon Delaney, and the editor who accepted his work for publication are exactly the same type of people as the family who excised me from their lives so many years ago. They believe in a society where everyone is straight. Where everyone no doubt is white and catholic.

To paraphrase a tweet that I saw at one point yesterday afternoon, had Mr. Delaney substituted the word gay, with black, Jewish, traveller or handicapped, do you think that his editor would have allowed the article to run?

It is astonishing that in 2011, a full 18 years after the law criminalising homosexuality was repealed thanks to the herculean efforts of Senator David Norris that an article expressing these values could be allowed to be published in the largest paper in the land. And that it should be at the hand of such a person. An educated person.

It just goes to show, that as far as we think that we have come in Ireland, not everyone has made the journey with us.

Pasta porri, pancetta, pesto e pinoli.

Ok, so this is NOT a cookery blog, and I am NOT a chef, but I need something to change the recent direction of the blog and I just recently came across this recipe again. You must try it at least once.

You will need:

3 Leeks, washed, peeled and chopped.

A handful of toasted pine nuts

One packet of pancetta (Italian pork belly, available everywhere, the Lidl version is perfect)

2/3 good teaspoons of Pesto

A couple of good glugs of olive oil

A small pasta, shells or fusilli works well.

Method:

Fry off the pancetta. You want it to be crispy, reduce most of the fat out of it. Drain it of oil and then set it aside.

Add a good glug of oil to a deep frying pan or wide saucepan and sweat down the chopped leeks for about 10 minutes stirring occasionally. You want them to be fully soft and beginning to brown.

Add the pancetta and the pine nuts and the 2/3 spoons of pesto (to your taste really..)

Boil the pasta until al dente and when draining hold back half a cup of the water.

Mix in the leek, pine nut and pesto sauce and if too dry add a little of the water.

Serves 2. Double the ingredients for 4. Add more pesto if you really like pesto like me. :)

Just divine. Seriously.

Normal blogging service will be resumed shortly. I just needed to get that out of my system.

Final post on this matter.

Despite significant efforts on my behalf to secure a resolution to my complaint about the treatment that I had to endure on board an Aer Lingus Regional flight operated by Aer Arann, it appears as though the airline have no interest in bringing this matter to a conclusion.

Over the last 3 weeks I have in the interests of laying this matter to rest, so that I could get on with my life, attempted to come to an agreement on a joint statement with Aer Arann, however suddenly last week, in the middle of negotiations on the matter, Aer Arann went quiet and I have had no communication from them in 10 days.

I have spent an inordinate amount of time attempting to get them to at least acknowledge that their actions and the actions of their staff were extraordinary and disproportionate to any perceived slight that the staff member continues to maintain she felt and for them to withdraw their unreasonable and unnecessary requirement of me to provide an assurance regarding my future behaviour on their flights.

I have had to endure significant criticism from commenters on this site and other sites which included such gems as

This just sounds like a stupid fag having a hissy fit when he doesn’t get his own way

and as a result thanks to a desire never to have to read anything like that about myself ever again, and to return some sort of normality to my life, it now appears as though I have no further action left open to me but to accept defeat. It does not appear as though I am going to be able to resolve this to my satisfaction, and I do not have the energy or indeed the motivation to spend any more of my time on it.

Once again many thanks to everyone who contributed to this discussion, to all the messages of support and those who helped disseminate this story.

As always you may leave comments on this post, and the other posts which will stay up as a testament to my experiences with Aer Arann, however I now consider the matter, however unsatisfactorily; closed.

I can also say with a significant amount of certainty, that I will never be flying with this airline again.

Leo

Aer Arann.

For those of you who have been with me through this entire saga, this is a short update:

This afternoon, shortly after lunchtime a member of the PR team from Aer Arann made contact with me through a shared acquaintance.

They indicated that they were conscious of the ongoing issue, but they would really appreciate if I could find the time to come in and meet them and a senior executive in Aer Arann to discuss the situation face to face, and air my grievances, to try and find a solution.

This afternoon I attended a very polite and courteous meeting with the two members of Aer Arann staff that lasted approximately 2 hours and 30 minutes.

At the end of the meeting despite not reaching a final agreement or solution, the executive agreed that he would interview the staff member personally, and that I could be assured that he was a man of the highest integrity, and that he would come to his own opinion of the veracity of individual statements and revert to me with his conclusions.

I have agreed not to comment further about this matter (other than this update), on this blog, twitter or in the media until such a time as he reverts to me with his findings.

Thank you everyone who has left comments. I am very grateful to EVERYONE who has contributed to these posts.

Response from Aer Lingus and Aer Arann to the complaint I made about my treatment on their flight.

A few weeks ago I wrote a blog post here on this site that detailed my experience on an Aer Lingus Regional flight operated from Bristol to Dublin on Monday 27^th June.

I have put back up this post which is available here for those who did not have the opportunity to read it before I took it down on the advice of legal representation.

In the post, I outlined my experience aboard that flight and immediately afterwards and the actions of a member of the crew on that flight.

To summarise; during that flight, despite being myself polite, I felt that one of the staff members had been extremely rude and once the flight had landed, just before disembarking I had indicated that I was planning on making a complaint about her behaviour, namely her rudeness and lack of civility. It was at this point that the situation took a turn for the surreal, and shortly thereafter the plane was surrounded by Police cars, I was escorted from the flight and finally I found myself sitting in the Garda station in Dublin Airport.

The post was widely read on the day that it first appeared. I was contacted by a number of newspapers and radio stations including the Irish Times who ran a story the following day outlining the events. I was contacted by a number of lawyers who felt that it outlined a pretty clear case of defamation and I was advised to take down the post pending a possible legal action against the airline. This I duly did, and then spent the next week going back and forth with my solicitor on a possible case.

Unfortunately, after advice from a number of solicitors and barristers, it appears as this stage as though, as the law currently stands, a legal action against the airline is doomed to fail, thanks to a piece of legislation called the Montreal Convention.

This legislation, which was put in place in order to limit the amount of damages that an airline could have awarded against it in the event of an air accident, unfortunately through its language has been previously interpreted in an Irish court of law to mean that it excludes everything else and that you may not sue an airline for anything occurring on an international flight other than death, bodily injury or damage to or loss of luggage.

As a result, the only recourse available to me was to file a complaint to the airlines in question.

In response to this complaint, I received a polite reply from Aer Lingus which outlined their disappointment at hearing about my experience and their regret that I had not enjoyed my flight. It then went on to point out that Aer Lingus Regional was a franchise operation conducted by their partner Aer Arann, and as a result it would be Aer Arann who would be conducting an immediate and full investigation and that it would be Aer Arann that would contact me once this investigation was complete.

Despite sending a fax to Aer Arann on the same day as the fax to Aer Lingus, and a follow up email to clarify whether the fax had been received, it took approximately 3 weeks for Aer Arann to eventually reply to my complaint.

I have now received that communication from Aer Arann and although the letter has been marked private and confidential, I have chosen in respect of this letter to waive my confidentiality and I reproduce it here.

I will allow you the reader to draw your own conclusions about the tone of this letter, but I know how it reads to me.

In it, Aer Arann states that it has

conducted an immediate and full investigation.

It states that that investigation has completed and that

no further action is deemed necessary.

It then states that Aer Arann would be happy to welcome me on board their flights in the future

subject to me giving the airline an assurance that my future conduct will be appropriate and acceptable.

Finally it makes what is in my opinion a very thinly veiled threat that if I attempt to speak any further about this in any public forum, that Aer Arann will

reserve the right to protect its reputation.

I am absolutely astounded and astonished at this tone of this letter and I outline some of my issues with it below;

1)      At no point did Aer Arann contact me to ask me to participate in its investigation, and so I don’t understand how the investigation could be considered thorough. It appears as though the investigation canvassed the view and opinion of only one party to this complaint, namely the airline and its employees. The letter does not indicate if any other passengers were asked to participate in the investigation. Certainly there were passengers who commented on my original blog post indicating that they had been on the flight and had observed the events and concurred with my description of those events, however to my knowledge none of these passengers were contacted by Aer Arann or Aer Lingus in order that they could participate in their investigation.

2)      Aer Arann does not give the outcome of its investigation, other than to state that no further action is required.

3)      Aer Arann makes an unreasonable and unnecessary requirement of me that in order to fly with them again; I will need to provide an assurance that my future conduct will be appropriate and acceptable. As I maintain that my conduct has always been appropriate and acceptable, I have to assume, although it is not clearly stated in the letter, that Aer Arann is not of the same view.

4)      The final paragraph in the letter appears to say that should I attempt to speak to the media or blog/tweet or otherwise publicise any information about this flight, experience, complaint or response to my complaint that they will move against me. How it will do this is not outlined, but I fear you do not need to be a legal expert to read between the lines here.

I feel that have been treated appallingly by Aer Lingus and their subcontractor Aer Arann both during and after the flight and again in reply to my complaint about this incredibly stressful experience.

In addition, I had to spend the last month, constantly ringing the Garda Station in Dublin Airport to find out what was happening with the complaint that the crew member originally made about me. Despite the fact that I was released shortly after I was originally detained, because the crew member had made an original complaint about me, the Garda Siochana were bound to follow that complaint to a conclusion. The three possible outcomes were:

1)      That no further action was necessary if I accepted a caution.

2)     That the complainant (the Aer Lingus Regional crew member) would make a statement about the incident at which point the case would go to court.

3)     That the complainant (the Aer Lingus Regional crew member) withdrew the complaint at which point the case would be immediately and permanently closed.

Now obviously I was unwilling to accept a caution, as I did not feel as though I had done anything wrong, so I was anxious to find out whether or not the crew member had followed up with a statement about the complaint.

The Guard that I was dealing with, who was extremely helpful and courteous from the moment that I met him on that fateful night made numerous attempts over the space of three weeks to contact the complainant, but despite leaving a number of messages on her voicemail could not make contact with her. Eventually he confirmed to me, that if she didn’t call him back by the next day that he would attempt to contact her through the airline.

The staff member called him back the very next day, and confirmed that she was withdrawing her original complaint. She made a statement to this effect, and at this point the Guard rang me back to let me know this, and to confirm that the case was now closed and no record would appear next to my name.

You can understand my frustration.

This person made an untrue complaint about me to Gardai which resulted in my being very publicly escorted from a plane in front of 50 – 60 strangers. An event which I had absolutely no control over thanks to the (albeit necessary) importance that the Airport Police and authorities assign to such complaints.

After three weeks of hell waiting to find out what was going on with this complaint, the crew member decided to quietly withdraw her original complaint.

I cannot bring any action against the airline for defamation thanks to the Montreal convention, and as the icing on the cake, (or final slap in the face),

The incredibly terse and unfriendly letter that I received from Aer Arann in response to my complaint seems to adjudge me as guilty as charged (despite the staff member withdrawing the complaint), and I believe makes a thinly veiled threat to pursue me through the courts should I attempt to publicise my experience on their flight, or the response from their customer service department.

In addition, despite claiming in their letter that “Aer Arann places great emphasis on our customer service” the company fails to acknowledge that they had even received a complaint from me directly and furthermore didn’t even have the decency to sign the letter, but rather sent me a printout from a customer service supervisor.

I think that this speaks volumes for the priority that Aer Arann assigns to customer service.

In my opinion, airlines realise that complainants are unable to bring a legal case against them thanks to the Montreal Convention, and as such feel confident that they may respond in this manner secure in the knowledge that they are protected from any further action.

I am absolutely livid with this response. Not only was I treated abominably on the flight in question, their response to me also beggars belief. The national flag carrier of my country, Aer Lingus and one of the companies that they subcontract services out to Aer Arann have treated a paying customer no better than a common criminal.

It would seem to indicate that passengers need to be very careful about dealing with the cabin crew on international flights. I would certainly NOT recommend that you inform them that you are going to make a complaint about them.

In fact I would suggest not speaking, not looking at anything or anyone except the back of the seat in front of you, not purchasing anything from the in flight service. You might as well just pack yourself in your suitcase and go as cargo. It would appear to be the only way to ensure that you protect yourself from this kind of treatment. In addition, thanks to the Montreal convention, loss of your baggage is something that you can bring an action against the airline for. In a bizarre legal loophole, it would appear your luggage has more rights than you do.