Mr. Willie Walsh:

We would look at opportunities to grow at Cork and Shannon. I am in the business of growth. People want to focus on restructured businesses. If we look at Vueling, an airline that joined IAG, it has grown at a significant pace. When we acquired Vueling it flew about 14.7 million passengers. Last year it flew 21.5 million. We have a growth target of between 12% and 16% for that business this year. We are in an industry that benefits from growth, sustained by the demand that exists in the market. We are sensible in how we approach it but our reason for being attracted to Aer Lingus is our belief that there is growth opportunity in the Irish market. Ireland has come through a deep recession and is growing at a significant pace. It is one of the fastest growing economies and I believe that growth can be sustainable. There is a direct benefit to the number of people travelling into and out of this country. I believe Ireland represents a huge opportunity for tourism, particularly with the restructured cost base. That is what attracts us to it. We are open to looking at any prospect for growth at Dublin, Cork, Shannon or anywhere else growth may exist.

In relation to the Heathrow-Dublin services, there may be some rationalisation of the schedules so we do not overlap with one another.

When British Airways and Iberia merged we continued to operate the same number of services but just moved some of the services around so that we had a schedule that stretched right through the day rather than having certain flights operating on top of one another, which clearly would not make sense. What I would see is that Aer Lingus would continue to operate into terminal 2 at Heathrow and British Airways would continue to operate into terminal 5, which gives opportunities to customers. Operating into terminal 2 is a very good service and probably marginally better if one is making a point-to-point journey, in other words, if one is flying to London and that is one's destination. It is probably better going into terminal 2, T2, whereas if one is connecting at London, terminal 5, T5, is a better option. We would look at how we manage the flights through the day to ensure that we have a good selection of services both into T2 and into T5. We believe that is the sensible thing to do.

Gatwick is a good airport. We have a strong presence there through British Airways, Iberia operates into it and Vueling are also operates into it. We see no reason we cannot have Aer Lingus operating in there as well and working together where it makes sense to feed traffic to one another if we can do that but to support one another to sustain and potentially grow the network we operate.