Mr. Willie Walsh:

I am delighted to be serving Belfast. I made a personal commitment in my time at British Airways to do everything I could to restart BA services from Heathrow to Belfast. I honoured that commitment and will continue to honour that commitment because it is a great market for us and we get great traffic feed.

I would like to see the British Government build on what it has done with devolved APD because without question what is damaging Belfast is that the British Government has a very high passenger tax that the Irish Government has seen the sense to remove. The removal of that tax has been the source of significant growth in the Irish market. I am hopeful that the British Government will look to remove the air passenger tax in Northern Ireland as well because that is damaging the Northern Ireland economy and damaging the ability of Belfast to attract new business. We love serving Belfast; I know Aer Lingus does. We get great direct traffic and great feed out of Belfast as well.

I thank the Chairman for inviting me to attend this meeting. I want to explain something that I may not have done at the beginning. Because of takeover panel rules, I have been very restricted in what I can say. So I was not able to engage publicly and do media interviews, but the panel has been flexible in giving me the opportunity to do some press interviews and appear before the committee today, subject to my financial adviser making sure I did not do anything to breach the rules. I acknowledge that the panel has done that. I equally thank the Chairman and members of the committee for giving me the opportunity to outline what I think is a fantastic opportunity for Aer Lingus as part of the International Airlines Group.