February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
The Irish government is willing to allow armed air marshals to fly in and out of the country on U.S. airlines, the minister for Transport, Seamus Brennan, indicated in New York last week.
Brennan, who was in New York to address the United Nations on the issue of worldwide road traffic deaths, said that he did not see the matter of armed air marshals being an issue so long as a proper protocol was drawn up.
“I’ve asked the attorney general to take a look at possible legal objections, but in general most states would not have an issue with U.S. airlines in this regard,” Brennan said.
He said U.S. passenger carriers flying into Ireland had not yet made a request to carry armed marshals.
At the end of last year, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security issued an emergency order that would mandate armed marshals on aircraft flying in and out of the U.S. and through U.S. airspace if the U.S. government deemed that there was a significant security threat.
The move followed a number of cancellations of flights, most of them between London and Washington, D.C., after security fears were raised.
Brennan, who is representing European Union transport ministers during Ireland’s current EU presidency, stressed that any move to include armed marshals on transatlantic flights should ideally not be just left to one government alone.
“The political reality is that everyone needs to agree. There would need to be prior consultation and it would have to be tied to a specific flight,” he said.
Ireland, however, did not oppose the idea in principle.
EU member states are not in complete agreement over the air marshal issue and some, Italy for one, have expressed opposition to the idea.
The U.S. position is flexible in that requests for armed marshals will only be made if specific flights are deemed to be high risk. Washington has indicated that alternative security measures are also a possibility is countries balk at the idea of armed guards.
Armed marshals are already aboard some flights crossing the Atlantic from Ireland.
Royal Jordanian Airlines includes armed marshals on its flights that pass through Shannon on the way to New York and Chicago.
Aer Lingus has indicated that it will include armed marshals on its transatlantic flights if the U.S. government ever asks.
But a spokesman said that the airline was not ready to comply with such a request because there was no provision as yet for carrying appropriately trained personnel.
If Aer Lingus was asked right now it would have to cancel that particular flight, the spokesman said.
If a request is made to Aer Lingus in the future, the necessary expertise would most likely be supplied by the Garda Siochana’s Emergency Response Unit.
The ERU, the Garda’s version of a SWAT team, is trained in the use of a variety of weapons and to deal with a range of life-and-death situations. Members undergo part of their training at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Va.
However, it is likely that members of the ERU would have to be newly trained to deal with the kind of uniquely dangerous situations that would be presented by armed hijackers seizing a pressurized airliner in mid-flight.
On one Jordanian flight, for example, an armed marshal shot dead a would-be hijacker, but as the hijacker collapsed he dropped a grenade that exploded, injuring 15 passengers. The plane did land safely.
Other Irish security personnel that could be drawn upon to provide security on Aer Lingus flights include members of the Garda Special Branch and the Irish Army Rangers, whose members are already trained in dealing with hijack situations on the ground.
But the Rangers could only be used in conjunction with Garda members as Irish law requires that army personnel only ever engage in national security matters when they are acting “in support of the civil power.”