Sean Barrett (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome our guests. There is strong and pretty much unanimous support in the Seanad - which does not get reported very much - as our guests will have heard from Senators Brennan and Mooney, for the case they have been making. The Minister came into the Seanad yesterday to announce the committee, and I note that there are some misgivings today that it is excessively focused on finance in its orientation, and both David Begg and Christoph Mueller were not at the recent board meetings for various reasons. I think their terms had expired. Would it have been different if both those directors had been there - the one who had been managing the airline in the recent past and the one who was the representative of the employees?

I have a few concerns. What does British Airways bring to the party? I have mentioned its eclipse by both EasyJet and Ryanair in the UK. A consumer survey put it at number 17. Therefore, it is not Singapore Airlines bringing something that is any way superior to the product that is produced by Aer Lingus. Another concern relates to what happened in Scotland. As a region, it is seriously neglected by British Airways, which is Heathrow focused, as speakers have said. There are approximately 400,000 passengers from Scotland to North America and we transport 2.4 million passengers number on that transatlantic route. The population of Scotland, at 5.3 million, is 500,000 more than ours at 4 million odd. There is more transatlantic traffic out of Dublin than out of Manchester, Birmingham, Belfast, Glasgow and Edinburgh combined. We are talking about "air Heathrow" taking over. Heathrow is still growing. Ever since I started to study this area, Heathrow has been full. It just keeps growing. It is growing faster than Gatwick where in the past five years there has been a decline. The traffic will go through there. I believe that is the plan. I would be nervous having regard to the anti-competitive mergers that people mentioned, the gobbling up of British Midland and so on. We have developed a North Atlantic product that is six times better, at 2.4 million passengers versus 400,000 passengers, than anything that serves Scotland, a country the same size as ours. I do not believe British Airways has any great interest in developing that whereas in recent years Aer Lingus has had, and that is to the credit of everybody involved.

I thank our guests for their submissions. I do not want to exceed my allocation of three minutes as the committee has to keep to the timetable set. Certainly in the Seanad, there is no great welcome for this bid. What our guests are doing is appreciated. As Senator Brennan said, the bid of €300 million equates to about two days' public expenditure, but what has been built up on the North Atlantic routes in particular is worth far more than that.