Ms Catherine Gubbins:

May I address some of those points? The Deputy is absolutely right that the DAA is a critical piece of State infrastructure. We are a semi-State body but we are also a commercial entity. We are required to fund ourselves from our profits. We also fund ourselves through accessing debt in the capital markets and historically from the European Investment Bank. We have a credit rating and need to protect our financial profile so we can continue to access capital markets on a go-forward basis.

When this crisis hit, it became evident that the aviation industry was one of the most significantly impacted industries. As the months and weeks passed, it also became clear that this crisis was going to impact us for a significant amount of time. Mr. Philips has on a number of occasions referenced the fact that all the industry analysts throughout the course of the two years that the pandemic impacted us suggested we would not be back at 35 million passengers until 2024 and 2025. To be clear, we had a payroll cost at the end of 2019 of €20 million per month, with 3,000 domestic staff to service 35 million passengers. The employment wage subsidy scheme, EWSS, and temporary wage subsidy scheme, TWSS, supports were approximately €4 million of that. Our staff took pay cuts which amounted to approximately €2 million or €3 million per month. We were able to remediate our €20 million per month payroll costs by reducing them to approximately €9 million per month. We absolutely needed to do that or we would have been losing €1 million per day for those two years. That would have categorically damaged our financial profile for the next number of years. We were always mindful that we needed to be able to get back up off the mat when the pandemic stopped impacting us and we could do our business again. That is a little bit of context around why we felt we needed to make that decision.