Mr. Michael O'Leary:

I am joined by Mr. Eddie Wilson, the Ryanair DAC CEO. I am the Ryanair Group CEO. Rather than reading a long-winded statement, it would be easier and assist the discussion to take the committee through a few quick slides on what we are doing at the moment in Ryanair and in Ireland and our concerns about the current state of our national aviation policy. With the agreement of the committee, there are only about eight slides and we will go through them quickly.

The first slide is a quick summary of where Ryanair finds itself at the end of 2022, which is in a strong period of recovery from the existential crisis of Covid-19 or that Covid-19 visited on our industry. We remain, as we emerge out of Covid-19, by a considerable distance the lowest fare, lowest cost EU airline. We are seeing a strong recovery in traffic this year. Our year end is March but we are on track to carry around 168 million passengers, which is up 13% on our pre-Covid traffic. Our customer service metrics are at all-time highs, mainly because of good reliability and excellent on-board service delivery by our crews. We are investing and significantly upgrading our environmental rating. The Carbon Disclosure Project, CDP, now rates Ryanair grade B, an industry-leading environmental rating for a European airline. We expect that to rise to a grade A in the next 12 months as we invest in new aircraft that are much more fuel-efficient. We are also the number one EU airline for environmental and social governance. After the trauma of Covid-19, Ryanair emerged with a strong balance sheet, which has enabled us to make brave decisions about recruiting people during Covid-19 and continuing to acquire new aircraft which allows us, uniquely in Europe, to grow very significantly over the next four or five years. We are very keen that a significant proportion of that growth would be allocated here in Ireland.