Mr. Donal Moriarty:

I addressed a similar question from Deputy Carey. A decision was taken during the course of the pandemic, but it was primarily taken to ensure that Aer Lingus could restore and resume services from Shannon Airport, namely, services to London Heathrow and, critically, the transatlantic service to New York and Boston. Without having taken those decisions, the viability and prospect of the return of those services would have been significantly damaged. At the time, we offered all of our cabin crew based in Shannon the choice to redeploy to Dublin or Cork or take voluntary severance. All of their choices in respect of that were accommodated.

We have closed the cabin crew base, but have ensured the resumption of the services which, the Deputy will acknowledge, are critical to the mid-west region.