Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I reiterate that the Minister for Transport is meeting representatives from Aer Lingus today and I cannot pre-empt the outcome of that meeting. It is fair to say that while the Minister is very aware of the impact aviation has on the environment in terms of emissions, he is also aware of the essential nature of aviation for an island nation. He is certainly not anti-airline or anything like that.

To my mind, the crucial routes from Shannon Airport are to Heathrow, the east coast of the US and another EU hub. That hub was going to be either Paris or Frankfurt and we got the former, which was great, but then along came the pandemic and we lost pretty much everything. It is a very worrying situation. Again, Ireland is not Australia or New Zealand; it is very different. Airlines do not want to be paid to stay on the ground in Europe. They do not want to be paid to run routes on which there are no passengers. They will just move the aeroplanes, and that is how the single European sky works. Unfortunately, that could happen to us and that is why we will need a large and attractive incentive package to get airlines and their routes back. We can do that only when passengers are allowed and able to travel, and we are just not at that point at the moment for public health reasons.

I am always worried about giving information about grant schemes because there are now so many that I tend to mix them up. My recollection is that it is a straight grant of €4,000. An applicant does not have to demonstrate particular fixed costs. We are not going to ask for insurance bills, utility bills or whatever, but applicants will have to show that their turnover is down 75% or more and that they had a turnover of €50,0000 or more, and they have to commit to reopening or staying open.

As for missing the application deadline, to be honest there is not an awful lot we can do about that. People miss application deadlines all the time and we cannot just reopen them all the time. Nevertheless, there are sometimes cases, particularly humanitarian ones, where somebody may have missed the deadline for very good reason, but just not having applied, not thinking it was necessary to apply or not getting around to it would not be enough. We will consider a bit of flexibility in certain circumstances if there are overwhelming compassionate reasons but that is limited.