Mr. Vincent Harrison:

On the regulatory regime, as stated by the Deputy, it has been in place for 20 years. It has pursued a relentless purpose, which is securing the lowest airport charges such as are levied at Dublin Airport, which is the case by any comparison. That is, pretty much, what the legislation says it has to do. I have some hope that with the new legislation and the amalgamation of other regulatory requirements or processes within the same body, perhaps a more balanced view of the entirety of aviation might emerge from that body. That is yet to be seen, however, because that merger has not taken place yet. That is perhaps looking in hope into the future.

One of the things I have mentioned previously is that there is not an incentive built into the system to have infrastructure there before one needs it. In fact, there is a penalty for doing so in respect of reducing one’s pricing. That makes it quite difficult to both meet current requirements and build. When you are building in a busy airport, inevitably you are taking away some capacity in order to build on it, while providing for the long term.

We have a very significant construction plan ahead of us. When you use dates like 2029, we are talking about the end of the process for all of the construction, as opposed to nothing being delivered within that time. We can clearly take the committee through the graduated phasing of the delivery of infrastructure in some other process.

There have been a number of indications as to what can be done by the committee, either in terms of policy context or otherwise.

There are two things that create a difficulty for us. One, as I said, is the regime in terms of funding capacity. Coming back to one of the points Ms Gubbins made about our lending capacity or credit rating, we say to a lender that we will not damage our credit rating. Therefore, if there is any possibility we will do that, of course, we will defer the investment and not strain our balance sheet. That does not make the capacity get delivered any further but it does make us capable of maintaining the financial integrity of the country. That is an inbuilt compromise that is in the existing system that could be amended with a different, more assertive funding mechanism in place.

The second thing is planning. It will not surprise anybody in the committee that all of these large infrastructure projects have yet to go through planning processes, the An Bord Pleanála appeals and so on, and they will do. A concern I would have and would share with infrastructure providers is that while housing is fundamentally needed in Ireland, and there is no doubt about that, we need infrastructure in the economy as well. I suggest that as we pressurise the planning system to provide more houses, we need to pressurise and equip it to provide infrastructure as well. Ultimately, having all the people housed appropriately but not able to access public transport, airport infrastructure and so on will not be an optimal solution either. That is one area where we would absolutely like the committee to carry the flag, which is in terms of enabling us to have a plan in place to build that infrastructure and to provide it gradually, although there are probably too many components of the jigsaw to outline them here as to what precisely that will look like.