Mr. Basil Geoghegan:

The ability to increase charges would allow us to be more profitable, which would improve our debt to profitability ratios, which would maintain our credit rating. It would also allow us to decide to build for the future, out to 2040 or 2050, in whatever is needed, and to do it in a way that is sustainable. We do not necessarily want to do it in the cheapest possible way. We need to do it in a way that also meets our climate action goals. Pre-Covid, airlines wanted to have a better transfer centre at Dublin Airport because it is a very good way of bringing traffic in and out and bringing it transatlantic. In the context of where climate change is going, a far more carbon-efficient way of flying from secondary cities in Europe is to fly in a narrow body aircraft to Dublin and in a narrow body aircraft across the Atlantic, as opposed to flying from, let us say, Barcelona to Frankfurt and getting into a Boeing 747. That is important.

We want to be able to build those facilities. Many of the members may have questioned at points why they have to end up at the south terminal and get on a bus to go back to the terminal. Perhaps they would prefer to see hard stands. So would we, but we must invest. There were plans to build more stands with appropriate piers at the north end of the airport, which is where more of the Ryanair flights take off from, so that the airline could continue to build. The increase in charges would facilitate that investment. I acknowledge that the people who were on the board of Dublin Airport, as it was in the 1960s, made the decision to take the land that we now have for the north runway. That was before I was born. That is the length of decisions that we have to take.