Mr. Pádraig Ó Céidigh:

No, I have not. I am still not chairman of the board and I do not have any authority or footing to formally or properly approach Aer Lingus on the routes the Chairman mentioned. Having said that, when I am officially chairman, one of the first strategies I will have is to see exactly where we are at with Aer Lingus and work out with it what the company requires to get the three Heathrow slots the Chairman and Senator Dooley mentioned. It is not just three Heathrow slots but also their timing that is fundamentally important. There is no point in having a slot that is just a filler for an airline that might decide, for example, to put a spare aeroplane on the Shannon-Heathrow route. They have to be slots that suit members of the business community who are travelling to and from Shannon. There are four waves of aircraft into and out of airports, four particular slots. We must ensure the slot we have coming into and going out of Heathrow from Shannon hits one of those waves of international traffic coming in. That is fundamental and very much at the top of the agenda.

The potential of setting up an airline is longer term. It is important to look at it but it is not absolutely urgent here and now. The urgent issue is the Heathrow route and, as members said, getting at least the fundamentals of the transatlantic routes - Boston and New York - on flow. If we can nail that down, we can look at stage two of a strategy and a longer term strategy.

To respond to Senator Dooley, the total number of passengers who travelled from Shannon Airport to London Heathrow, Stansted and Gatwick in 2019 was around 600,000. That is a serious number and I cannot see why any airline would not have an interest in working with us in Shannon on getting back to those passenger numbers again. We have the trend there. Also in 2019, 134,000 passengers were carried on the JFK to Shannon route and back again. That is a sizeable number of transatlantic passengers. I sometimes speak in English and think in Irish but tá an stair againn. We have the history of doing that. It is just a matter of convincing the airlines that we can go there again and also to work hand in hand with us on that.