Mick Barry (Cork North Central, Solidarity) | Oireachtas source

I do not see anything responsible about social dumping and I believe the Revenue Commissioners and the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection have turned a blind eye to this practice for far too long. I will park the point there.

In terms of the regulators that we have before the committee this afternoon, I have listened carefully to the points that have been raised by Ms Mannion. She puts forward argumentation to the effect that it is a question of pragmatism and not an issue of whether to take a hard line or a soft line. The question is whether one gets results. In fact, she has outlined her case very well. However, I was concerned, as I always would be when I hear such a phrase from a regulator, when she said that Ryanair had taken its eye off the ball and implied that this was the root of the problem. I put it to Ms Mannion that Ryanair did not so much take its eye off the ball as engage in a calculated and deliberate policy to maximise profits for its corporation. I believe that it knew that it would gain financially if it did not properly advertise alternative flights and entitlements that people may have to claim compensation for hotels, meals, etc. It seems to me that the CAA in the UK is operating on the understanding and premise that this was a calculated and deliberate policy by Ryanair and I suspect that is the basis on which it is taking a more hard-hitting approach.

We can take a hard line or a soft line but if our starting point is that a company has taken its eye off the ball as opposed to making a hard-headed commercial decision, then it raises a question for me about the approach being adopted by the regulator.

The main questions I want to ask are for the IAA and, in particular, for Mr. O'Connor. In his previous contribution, Mr. O'Connor said he has no ambition to micromanage Ryanair or any other company. That is a little bit of a red herring because I do not think anyone here or any other sensible person would expect him to micromanage the affairs of Ryanair. They would expect him to have some kind of idea about what is really going on behind the scenes. This is a real crisis and inconvenience for huge numbers of ordinary people which the IAA is there to protect. Does the IAA have any obligation to be aware that proper crewing arrangements have been put in place? Did it have no idea beforehand that this crisis was going to blow up? If not, why not? One does not have to be a micromanager to see a crisis of this scale coming. It seems to me it has taken the IAA completely by surprise which indicates to me that we have soft touch regulation here all over again. I put that to Mr. O'Connor for comment.

It has been said that the April to March holiday year, as opposed to the January to December holiday year, did not confer commercial advantage on companies that availed of it, and that included Ryanair. There are a lot of people who work in the airline industry day to day who dispute that. The Irish Airline Pilots' Association disputes it and I will let its representatives outline the reasons when they come to the microphone later on. It was introduced in 2008, so why will Ryanair begin on 1 January 2018? Why did it take ten years to bring Ryanair and others operating in Ireland into line with this? It seems extraordinarily slow in comparison with other European countries.