Mr. Niall Gibbons:

That is a hard question to answer right now. All of those aviation routes have been decimated. The Deputy is quite right in that the North American experience was spectacular for the past seven to eight years. Traditional gateways like New York, Boston, and Chicago are there and they will come back on a smaller scale in the initial sense, but we are looking out for where the real spectacular growth came from in the last six to seven years which was from places like San Francisco, LA, Seattle, and Dallas with American airlines, together with Philadelphia and Charlotte. I have no crystal ball right now but we need to talk to all of the carriers which are living now day by day. Back in March Delta Airlines had a cash burn of $100 million a day which is now down to $18 million. These are big numbers which are impacting on the connectivity.

The American airlines have been granted a bailout of $50 billion by the US Government to keep things going; and Lufthansa has received €9 billion as have Air France and KLM. We are fortunate to have two great carriers in Ryanair and Aer Lingus that serve us really well and we have to do everything we can to work with those airlines to help restore connectivity, particularly into our regional airports. Dublin Airport is in very difficult shape now but many of the airlines will return to Dublin. Ireland West Airport, Knock, however, is closed at the moment. Shannon Airport has no commercial flights right now and Cork Airport has an average of two per day. One of the biggest crises we will have will be the restoration of the numbers of people coming here.

People are putting out some projections that perhaps we will see it restored within three years. There are many factors which will underpin this. Ryanair made that comment recently and we would love to think that because that would be the ultimate driver of how fast recovery comes. Many of those airlines and routes, however, were hard won. They are sometimes marginal calls as to whether one will fly from Dallas to Dublin or to Manchester. We go in and work very hard to sell the destination and we are going to have to do that again.