Mr. Eddie Wilson:

As an airline we are complying with all the EU regulations. Everyone else in Europe is flying. The balance has been struck between public health and returning to a functioning economy. A functioning economy means that people will have to travel, and do so for business purposes as well as visiting friends and relatives, putting children in college and holidays. We are operating in exactly the same way as every other airline in Europe. The outlier here is Ireland. Ireland, for some bizarre reason, has ignored what the other EU 26 has done, namely to return to air travel, unrestricted within the EU, since 1 June. That is all we are doing. We are carrying on our business in that manner. It is the muddled response of the Government, with green lists and people on it, and not on it, which is causing the confusion.

On public health advice, do not listen to me, but to Dr. Ryan of the World Health Organization, who says it is about how States handle infection at home, that they should stop looking abroad and for other scapegoats. People are sensible in how they comply when they get to the countries to which they are travelling. The idea that the Irish Government has excluded Germany is laughable. The Germans are the gold standard for how they handled the pandemic right from the start. Dr. Ryan singled them out at a press conference yesterday for what they have done on track and trace, for localised lockdowns and for volumes of testing, yet somehow we in Ireland have some sort of magical formula about which the Germans and the rest of Europe are unaware. The rest of Europe is moving. There are spikes and there will be spikes here too, and we will have to manage that, but shutting down the economy will bring us back, if not to the 1980s to the 1950s when we tried that experiment before by trying to do things on our own. It will not work. People need to understand that it is not about holidays, it is about connectivity. Holidays are an important element of our business but that is now done for the summer, we are heading into the winter. Traffic, not only in Ireland but from a European perspective, will halve. This committee should be asking how we will attract the remaining traffic back into Ireland because if we do not we will lose it, and lose it forever. What will happen is that next year, the 335,000 in the tourist industry will not have work because there will be nobody flying here. We have to get back to normal and balance the health concerns. The Government advice is disproportionate and will do structural damage to the economy.