Mr. Pádraig Ó Ríordáin:

The engagement with the community regarding the second runway is at the core of our thinking in every respect. When discussing the second runway at board level, engagement gets a great deal of attention. We started that engagement with the community in St. Margaret's even before we publicly stated what our next steps would be. The night before, our CEO met the community to inform everyone of what was happening and what the next steps would be. This process has been under way since. We have met a broad range of community groups, their representatives and individuals. If anyone wants to engage with us, we will meet him or her, generally at a senior level, by which I mean from the CEO and senior executive levels down. This is not being outsourced, as we are taking this seriously at the core of our business. We have dropped approximately 30,000 information leaflets and we have a website dedicated to the project for everyone affected.

We have also answered every question that has been asked of us. We are trying to be very transparent from the start about everything we are doing, why we are doing it and the consequences of that.

That feeds into the second question which was about the environmental impact statement. The scope of the environmental impact statement is being worked through. As part of that there is consultation with not only each of the statutory stakeholders but also with the community and everybody else who wishes to participate, so the scope of the statement is defined having heard and listened to all of those voices. The next step is that we appoint consultants who undertake the environmental impact statement in accordance with international standards. They come back at the end of that and there is a further consultation at that stage on their environmental impact statement. To the extent that mitigation factors are required we would propose those.