How’s that Belfast base working out?

Today’s Financial Times carries a bleak interview with Aer Lingus CEO Dermot Mannion, which of course is part of a pattern of bleak economic news these days.  One part of it brings us back to the uproar that surrounded the departure of Aer Lingus from Shannon for the El Dorado of Belfast –

[Aer Lingus] was even planning substantial investment – placing new orders for more short-haul jets from 2010 and the establishment of its first operating bases in Britain or continental Europe.

But in the short term further changes were needed in the operating cost base to help ensure long-term viability … Mr Mannion dismissed Ryanair’s attack on the performance of Aer Lingus’s new operating base in Belfast, and said it had filled far more seats than claimed by Ryanair, which itself did “not have one route making money out of Belfast”.

At the time that Belfast was announced, Aer Lingus said it had selected it as an alternative to a base in England (Birmingham was mentioned), and part of the logic was to run Belfast with a lower cost base than Dublin.  Now all of sudden Aer Lingus is again looking at non-Irish bases and still in search of lower costs.  And their response to Ryanair’s calculations that they are not filling seats out of Belfast is to claim that even Ryanair can’t make money on its flights out of there!  To state the obvious, if Ryanair has half the cost per bum-in-seat of Aer Lingus (as the article says), how does EI expect to make money operating from Belfast?

One suspects that the government has not had its last Aer Lingus-induced headache.