Mr. Joe Thompson:

To illustrate the impact of this, today we connect approximately 50,000 customers between Aer Lingus-operated services between Ireland and Gatwick and our services from Gatwick to long-haul destinations. The equivalent figure for British Airways - it is driven in part by the need to connect between Heathrow and Gatwick in this case - is 65. There is a big multiple in the number of customers who connect between Aer Lingus-operated flights and Virgin Atlantic-operated flights at Heathrow relative to those who connect between British Airways-operated flights and Virgin Atlantic-operated flights today. From memory, the multiple is of the order of five or six times, and that is despite the fact that we do have a partial remedy in place to the BA-BMI transaction that allows us to make better interline connections between British Airways and Virgin Atlantic today at Heathrow than would have been the case without that remedy. It is a partial remedy and it still only delivers a fraction of the benefits to consumers that our existing partnership with Aer Lingus provides.

Some other points were made as well, specifically with regard to Virgin Atlantic's interest in the Ireland market. The reality of aviation, and specifically long-haul aviation, is that it is very difficult for an airline to operate long-haul services away from its home market and its main bases. We have had experience of that ourselves in operating flights between Hong Kong and Sydney. It is a very difficult thing to achieve, to operate those services away from the home base, but to imply that Virgin Atlantic has not had an interest in the Irish market over the last 30 years is absolutely not the case. We have sold tickets very effectively in the Irish market for many years, making use of our partnership with Aer Lingus in a relationship that has worked very well for both parties, and more importantly has worked very well for Irish consumers.