Mr. Fintan Towey:

The state of the aviation industry is deeply concerning. It is a well-known fact that it is an industry that is susceptible to economic cycles and downturns. This particular shock to the aviation industry goes far beyond any setback that has previously been experienced and all of the industry is experiencing enormous difficulty, with the sole exception of a small part that is primarily focused on freight. Outside of that, airlines, airports, lessors and maintenance firms are all experiencing enormous difficulty and in turn that means there are huge impacts for the workers across all those firms and industries. Many of those firms have already had to take significant cost-cutting measures, including staff redundancies, which have brought a huge amount of hardship and, of course, many workers have experienced extensive pay cuts as well. The state of the industry is deeply concerning.

The key challenge or question for the industry is when will it be possible to get back to business. As everybody in this virtual room will be aware, that is deeply intertwined with considerations of public health and continuing measures that are necessary to counter the spread of the virus, and that obviously has to take priority. While the industry has been going through this turmoil there have been significant support measures in place, mainly through the general employment support frameworks that have been implemented by the Government, and they have been availed of across the industry. There are then some sector-specific supports as well.

Throughout this crisis we have had very close engagement with the industry. We have maintained intensive engagement at official level because clearly we need to have that coalface knowledge of the impact on services, supply chains and so on, which are critical to our economy. That is something we have monitored very carefully. There has been close ministerial engagement both bilaterally with a number of the major players and in multilateral settings. For example, the Minister and the Minister of State-----