Ms Lynne Embleton:

The Deputy is right. Going into this crisis, Aer Lingus was in a reasonably robust and healthy position but the pandemic has eroded that quite spectacularly. Therefore, if I look at Aer Lingus, I can see that we are still burning cash on a daily basis. From the day we stop burning cash, that is not the end of our problems. We need to repay the debt and interest, restore the balance sheet and have the money to be able to pay for aircraft and the capital associated with that. The pathway for restoring connectivity and getting the airline back to financial health is a long one.

The Deputy asked how inefficient the airline is. Aer Lingus has a long history, which has significant benefits in terms of the brand, knowledge and people, but it also means that some aspects of working practices are out of sync with more new kids on the block competitors and we need to tackle that if we are going to have an Aer Lingus that can compete, grow routes and be successful in the future. There are some inefficiencies. The biggest inefficiency today is purely scale. We are not flying and, therefore, we have a lot of fixed costs that are drawing on cash in the business and we do not have the flying programme to cover those costs. The biggest inefficiency is scale. We would like to get back to scale.