The news that Ryanair is under investigation by the UK Civil Aviation Authority for charging parents extra to sit next to their own children is, on the face of it, just another data point in the long, dreary saga of budget airlines nickel-and-diming their passengers. But look closer, and you see something more unsettling: a society that has lost the ability to distinguish between a market transaction and a moral obligation.
Let’s start with the obvious. Ryanair’s defence, that it offers allocated seating for a fee and that families can choose to pay it or not, is a masterpiece of bureaucratic sophistry. It is the sort of logic that would have allowed Victorian factory owners to argue that child labour was simply a matter of “supply and demand”. The market, we are told, is a neutral arbiter. But no market exists in a vacuum: it is embedded in a web of social norms, legal frameworks and, yes, moral intuitions. The notion that a parent should have to pay a surcharge to sit next to their five-year-old on a flight is not just a commercial inconvenience; it is an assault on the basic idea that families are a unit, not a collection of autonomous consumers.
The minister’s riposte, calling the practice “unacceptable”, is welcome. But it also reveals a troubling pattern: we now need the state to step in and enforce what was once common decency. We have outsourced our moral reflexes to regulators. A generation ago, the idea of separating a parent from their toddler on a plane would have been met with universal outrage, and the airline would have retreated in shame. Now, we need a formal investigation, a press release from a minister, and possibly a new piece of legislation. This is what happens when the market colonises every sphere of life: the very idea of “reasonableness” becomes a commodity to be bought and sold.
Consider the historical parallel. In the late Roman Empire, as the bonds of civic obligation frayed, the state increasingly had to intervene in matters that were once handled by custom and honour. Senators had to be compelled by law to fund public games; landowners had to be threatened with confiscation to maintain roads. Sound familiar? We are witnessing a similar atrophy of voluntary association and mutual obligation. Ryanair is not an outlier; it is the logical endpoint of a culture that sees human relationships as a series of transactions. If you can charge for priority boarding, why not for sitting next to your child? The only constraint is the limit of public tolerance, and we have been moving that boundary for decades.
What makes this particularly infuriating is the sheer pettiness of the sums involved. Ryanair made €1.92 billion in profit last year. The fee for allocated seating is a few euros. This is not about revenue; it is about discipline. It is about training customers to accept that every convenience, every human warmth, every familial tie is a premium service. It is the disaggregation of the passenger into a set of revenue streams: luggage, legroom, boarding priority, and now, basic proximity to one’s offspring. This is not capitalism; it is a cargo cult of monetisation.
And what of the national identity angle? Ireland, Ryanair’s home base, has long prided itself on its family-friendly reputation. The airlines of the Emerald Isle used to be known for something other than slapping hidden fees on desperate parents. Now we have a situation where a nominally Catholic country’s flagship carrier treats family unity as an optional extra. This is not just a business scandal; it is a cultural one. It reflects a broader European trend of elevating the individual consumer over the familial unit, a trend that conservatives on both sides of the Irish Sea ought to find alarming.
So yes, investigate Ryanair. Fine them if necessary. But do not pretend that this is an isolated case. It is a symptom of a deeper rot: a world in which everything is a price, and nothing has a value. We are all passengers on a plane that is gradually unbundling itself, seat by seat, until there is nothing left but a bare metal tube and a queue of people waving credit cards. The child who cannot sit next to its mother is just the harbinger of a much lonelier journey ahead.
