Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

The OPW is an option. My instinct is that the local councils might be a better home for the development of heritage centres but that is the sort of issue that a chairperson and the board will have to decide and act on.

The Deputy is right that connectivity for Aer Lingus to the likes of London Heathrow and the east coast of the US is key. My sense of how this will work is that the key will be that we start seeing the development of the airport in connection with the region. What type of tourism must we think about? What is the future of tourism in the mid west and the west? How will Shannon service that? We must think and use this as an opportunity for change. We have built a tourism sector in which people fly into Dublin for two or three days, spend a day going to Clare, half an hour at the Cliffs of Moher, and return to Dublin. That is what a lot of tourism is about. If we try to revive Shannon Airport without changing that type of tourism model, it will not work. We need bigger thinking about the types of tourism and promote longer-stay tourism in the west, south west and mid west, particularly. Shannon Airport needs to feed into that and promoting those areas as green tourism destinations would work best.

The Minister for Finance negotiated the loan from the Ireland Strategic Investment Fund, ISIF, to Aer Lingus. In fact, ISIF negotiated it itself, as an independent body. It is a commercial loan and the Department of Transport does not have direct involvement although, obviously, we are aware of the developments. I understand that Aer Lingus is now funded and will be able to ride out the immediate crisis but no one knows for sure. The virus has kept changing, twisting and turning and we will have to be vigilant but, for the moment, that loan has helped Aer Lingus manage its way through what has been a difficult period.