Airspace
PhotograPh by Joanne MurPhy
The very first Aer Lingus flight took place back in 1936, just over 75 years ago. To celebrate, author Joseph O’Connor was asked to write a commemorative piece. Here, we publish the final chapter, along with their author’s introduction.
W
hen I was asked to write a text that would commemorate the 75th anniversary of Aer Lingus’s first flight, I began to think about Ireland in May 1936, the month in which that inaugural journey took place. The country of my grandparents’ youth was a poor one, only recently founded, facing immense challenges, yet its cultural traditions had survived and there was optimism that this small new democracy might one day be a place of freedoms. In our old literature, in our ballads and songs, in our poetry and legends, the imagery of flight appeared with striking frequency; a touching testament to the hopes
of an island people who, as Yeats said, “have gone about the world like wind”. It struck me as remarkable that a nation which not very long previously had been engaged in violent conflict and Civil War had progressed so quickly to establishing an airline. It also seemed to me that the story of Aer Lingus closely tracked the story of independent Ireland, sometimes in counterpoint, sometimes in parallel. We have long been a migrant people – we still are, today – and every flight is an anthology, a collection of stories, some happy, some poignant, all our own. So, rather than write a fact-laden article studded with statistics
and the names of aircraft, I asked if I could approach the commemorative piece as a series of verse-lyrics that might attempt to record the unique and indefinable aura that Irish people feel Aer Lingus has. “Airspace” was the result. I wrote it between Christmas 2010 and January of 2011, a month in which severe snow cut us off from the world for a while. In a small way, that separation reminded me of the longing we feel for other lands, other dreams, of the connections that Aer Lingus has existed to serve. I hope you enjoy reading the piece. Joseph O’Connor
APRIL/MAY 2012
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