Half-term break is the new June bank holiday. There is not a mother in senior management left at her desk in Dublin. The morning traffic has become a leisurely stroll. This huge migration must be what will be known in the 21st century as a Mass Movement.

But the fly in the ointment . . . and it's a pretty big fly . . . is Dublin airport.

The crowding at Dublin airport, like the tailbacks on the M50, has become so awful, and is discussed so frequently, that it's hard to realise just how appalling it is.

Flying out of Dublin airport the weekend before half-term . . . one of the very few wise decisions of our lives . . .

we were in the security queue before six o'clock in the morning.

And what a security queue it was.

The man in front of us explained that he was on a flight that was due to leave in 40 minutes, as he looked round the heaving yet static crowd in despair. He went searching for a person in pink . . . one of the stewards whose job it is to supervise the queue . . .but came back after five minutes having failed to find one.

"They've all gone underground, " he reported with a sigh. We were just going on holiday. He was in his work suit. We inched round the baffles like so many commuting snails.

Personally, I don't blame the pink stewards, powerless as they are, for keeping a low profile.

Later, as the queue moved closer to the narrow doors into the departure area one pink steward appeared, looked at us all crammed under the low ceiling, and appeared close to panic.

It was at this point that our poor white-collar, white-knuckle commuter made a break for it, crouching under the red tape of the baffles and making a bid, if not for freedom, then for a more humane type of captivity. The interesting thing was that his queue skipping met no resistance from the rest of us.

Minutes later, a couple, hand in hand and ashen with stress, did the same thing. They were not accompanied by a pink steward, yet they were allowed to move forward unimpeded.

Their suffering was obvious, and much worse than everyone else's. The queue made its own silent, sleepy judgements at six o'clock in the morning. It was kind of like Spartacus.

Even the security queues at Heathrow aren't this bad, and presumably the British are a much more likely target for terrorist attack than we are.

In Dublin, the clear and present danger is one of being trampled to the ground if the crowd panics for some reason, whether real or imagined.

Standing for hours, crammed with a thousand others under a low ceiling is not for the claustrophobic. One tries in a quietly determined way not to think about what would happen if a fire, no matter how minor, broke out.

And we weren't even in the big queue. The big security queue was down the other end. Our queue was a cakewalk in comparison. We were aiming for the gate near the airport pharmacy, and the post box.

The strange thing is that once you have gone through and you are queuing for your body and possessions to be scanned by the security machine, the crowds dissipate and life becomes simpler again, even if you have left your mobile phone in your pocket and cannot remove your right boot.

If this sort of crowd management was in operation at a football stadium there would be hell to pay. It is difficult to imagine how Dublin airport gets away with it, if not from a commercial point of view . . . we are used to being treated like dirt by public as well as private companies . . . then from a health-and-safety perspective.

One thing's for sure . . . if it goes on like this, it will not be the eco-warriors who put people off flying. The halfterm excursion may be a return to Dublin Zoo after all.