Mr. Michael O'Leary:

First, as the Deputy knows, nobody hardballs Mary Considine. If anything, the hardballing goes in the other direction when dealing with the management of Shannon Airport. They are tough operators. It is very important. Ireland really needs to go back. When talking about international aviation I like to quote the example of Bristol. It has a hinterland population of 10 million people within one hour of the city. It has one airport. We are a country with a population of five million people, if you take the Republic. If you add in the North, that is seven million people. We have 13 airports, including the North, and 11 airports just in the Republic. We are massively over-airported. Nobody likes to hear that, but it is the reality. The dominance of Dublin and Belfast is inevitable, to an extent, because of the very small population base. What has accentuated that dominance, and Dublin also dominates Belfast, is that the motorway network is arterial to and from Dublin. People drive to Dublin because it is easy to get to, particularly when it is not during rush hour. They will drive to Dublin Airport, and they will drive to Dublin from the catchment area of Belfast Airport too.

The future for airports in the west of Ireland is very perilous. Someone will raise the example of Waterford, and Waterford has no future. Knock survives, even though the road network once you get into Mayo is not great, because there is enough inbound traffic into the west of Ireland to use Knock, particularly from the UK. However, Knock means that Galway Airport, in essence, has no future. It has no commercial future as a destination. Shannon Airport struggles because of its physical location on the far side of Limerick. Everybody, including some friends I went to school with who live in Nenagh, used to use Shannon Airport until the M7-M9 was completed and now they never go to Shannon. They go to Dublin. Cork Airport struggles partly because it is close to Shannon Airport. If you are within two hours of an international airport, you are in its catchment area. If you take all of those airports and draw two hour circles around them, they all converge around the midlands somewhere. Mullingar and Athlone are in the everybody's catchment area. We think there is a viable future for Dublin, Cork, Shannon and Knock. There is no viable future for Donegal, Sligo, Galway or Waterford. The heroic sums of money we waste on public service obligations, PSOs, to those airports is completely wasted.