Mr. Matt Staunton:

We too have had a mixed experience with employers. With reasonable and responsible employers, we have come to forms of concession bargaining with temporary pay reductions and temporary hour reductions. We have managed to retain the main terms and conditions in the hope that there will be jobs for people to come back to.

However, due to inaction on this crisis in this country, these employers are coming back to us for more and that is scary.

The reason we are here is to appeal to committee members to get the message through that this piecemeal policy of dealing with this crisis in aviation is not working. We are falling into the trap again today. There was an aviation task force report, which the Government has sat on since July. There has been at best a cherry-picked approach to it and we need a joined-up approach. For example, we all knew there would have to be testing and a traffic light system. If we had that a few weeks ago, around the time of the budget, I wonder whether a certain airline would have closed its bases in Cork and Shannon. We need a single, joined-up approach to deal with this crisis and get our members back working.