LIKE cartoon characters playing pass-the-parcel with a ticking bomb, the participants in the airport fire dispute are waiting to see in whose face it blows up.

Today’s hospital pass from the firefighters to the Public Sector Remuneration Committee is a clear attempt to gain public support and positive PR before Saturday’s explosion.

For, unless someone does something radical, it seem certain that on that date, or very shortly afterwards, a simple cold – let alone swine flu – will bring the airport to its knees.

The sense of deja vu that will strike passengers trying to return to the island after a bank holiday week off will do nothing to calm their ire. In the end, people don’t care whose fault it is. They just want a pain-free journey.

That it should be Liberation Day when the three-month period of good grace runs out is ironic. Depending on whose version of the truth you believe, we were left free to be dictated to by greedy fire staff or small-minded bureaucrats stubbornly blocking a perfectly reasonable pay deal.

Again, the son trying to get to see his dying father in the UK, the honeymooning couple, the elderly couple on their holiday of a lifetime simply don’t care.

They just want to get there.

The airlines, too, must be close to despair. It is a brutal industry at the best of times – and these are far from the best of times.

What, they must think, can be done when the immovable object of a States negotiating body trying to hold together a pay policy, meets the irresistible force of a group of men determined to get what they see as justice?

One would have thought that a third party would be the solution. Someone to bring compromise and a better way.

Yet each seems to be a spectator in this grim struggle. Public Services and the union have been sidelined while, worst of all, the States own arbitration service has counted itself out on a technicality.

Meanwhile, the ticking from that parcel just gets louder and louder.