Mr. Pádraig Ó Ríordáin:

I will deal with the Cork-Boston route first. The reason it is stuck, essentially, is that it is a political issue in the United States. As Norwegian is a low cost airline there is an amount of resistance in the US, from a political perspective and particularly from airline unions, to Norwegian coming in.

There is a fear that, for example, it will use staff on lower wage levels and be able to produce a more cost effective product. Norwegian Air Shuttle has made a number of confirmations to indicate that this would not be the case and it would not be using those types of staff, but it has still become a political issue in the US. There is a good deal of pushback because Norwegian is the first. The US Department of Transportation has made a preliminary judgment that there is no legal basis to refuse this. Due to the open skies arrangement between the US and Europe there should not be a legal basis to do it, but that department is still dragging its feet and has not allowed it. The daa and many other stakeholders have been doing everything we can to try to get it progressed, but it is still blocked. One would expect over a period of time that if the United States does not have a legal basis for refusing the permit Norwegian Air Shuttle needs, it would be granted. As a fellow Cork man, who grew up under the flight path of Cork Airport, I am equally exercised about this, but we are being as thoughtful and progressive about it as possible. We are engaging as many stakeholders as possible to get this progressed. We just have to stick with it.

The Deputy asked a good question about the conditions. He is absolutely right. There is a total of 31 conditions but these two are very troublesome. Essentially, they do two things. First, it states that once we build the second runway there is, for the first time, a condition that applies to the entire airport. Once we have a second runway the entire airport cannot have more than 65 movements a night. Currently, we have 100 movements a night. That means approximately 3 million fewer passengers than what we currently have if that condition remains. In addition, as the Deputy said, the new infrastructure we build, which is the new runway, would have to be totally closed down between the hours of 11 p.m. and 7 a.m. When one considers matters such as connectivity, one of the advantages of the new runway is its length at 3.1 km. We have many flights that require that runway and because they are long haul flights they can arrive at any hour. To use the second runway to relieve the congestion that currently exists, because the air field of Dublin Airport is now totally full at various times of the day, and to ensure the airport is open for long haul flights in particular, the second condition that the runway must close down for those hours appears to be unworkable.

There are many other conditions that we will deal with but these two are major hurdles to realising the value of the new runway, not just for the daa but for the country in terms of building passenger numbers and connectivity.