Anyone who flies by Ryanair – probably Europe’s most successful budget airline – is likely to be familiar with Knock airport, officially known as Ireland West Airport Knock, in Co Mayo. A grand little airport indeed, now serving the west coast of Ireland from Donegal to Galway – especially since Galway, the capital of Connaught, now has no airport of its own. Knock Airport has just celebrated its first 30 years with a gala concert: its 10 millionth passenger will pass through the terminal this summer. And it’s all down to the vision, sense of purpose and determination of a local priest, Mgr James Horan (pictured right, at the time).
Fr Horan, who died in 1986 soon after the completion of the airport, was that old-style, roll-up-your-sleeves type of parish priest. Born in Mayo, he had worked as a curate in Glasgow, on board an ocean liner and among the poor and deprived. He also had a practical streak about raising funds, and collected the money to build a dance hall in the townland of Mayo’s Ballyhaunis in the 1960s; he thought more socialising and entertainment might deter the young from emigrating.
And after Pope John Paul’s visit to Knock Shrine in 1979, Fr Horan determined to bring an airport to the area, which Dubliners snootily called “a boggy, foggy place”. There were gales of laughter in the Dáil – Ireland’s parliament – about the proposal to construct Knock Airport: sure, it was on top of a mountain! No plane could land! There was even talk of skullduggery from competing airport locations to withhold a licence for Knock. And anyway, where was the money coming from?
Some eventually came from Charlie Haughey’s government, but for the rest, Mgr Horan raised it himself. He toured America and Australia, collecting more than IR £4 million for his project, and eventually, with the full involvement of the local community, the airport was officially opened in May 1986. Mgr Horan – as he became – died in the August, on his way to Lourdes, aged 75, having served his community valiantly.
Today, Knock airport serves 23 destinations worldwide, bringing 750,000 passengers into the west of Ireland annually. The smart folk laughed at Mgr Horan’s dream, but he sure achieved it.
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It seems to me that President Obama was right to express sympathy, without making an outright apology, at Hiroshima last week. The nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were abhorrent; Catholic moral theology has always seen aerial bombardment as ethically problematic, and atomic bombs are ghastly. But it looks cheap when politicians apologise for some past event over which they had no personal responsibility. You can only apologise for something that you have done, or has been done in your name.
There are those (including the late Leonard Cheshire VC) who would still maintain that the atomic bombs dropped on Japan were justified in that they brought the war in the Far East to an end. There have also been former British prisoners of war of the Japanese who believed that only these strikes, terrible as they were, finally brought the Japanese to surrender.
An American president has to balance all such elements. He should show humanity and regret at the suffering inflicted, but explicitly to apologise would be false.
And I suppose there was another outcome of Hiroshima: it frightened the world so much than no nuclear weapons have been employed ever since. God forbid.
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I thought that Tom Hanks couldn’t make a bad movie: now that I’ve seen A Hologram for the King I know that he can. The storyline is all over the place. However, the picture does include some fascinating glimpses into the landscape and terrain of Saudi Arabia, including a section about Mecca, which is portrayed as throbbing with activity.
Hanks, as the protagonist, learns how to tell mendicants that “God will provide”: you hold one finger up heavenwards. There’s a great deal about Islamic prayer in the movie. Some critics think there’s a patronising contrast between sophisticated Western secularism and Islamic worship, but I would say it’s more nuanced than that. Disappointing as a movie, it nevertheless had me looking up “holidays in Saudi Arabia” (not that I’d ever get to see Mecca, on several counts).
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