Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Wednesday, 8 November 2023
Joint Oireachtas Committee on Transport, Tourism and Sport
Irish Air Navigation Service: Chairperson Designate
Mr. Bryan Bourke:
I have a lot of ambition for the organisation. It is a new, exciting organisation that is now separate from its regulators, which is good. It is also good that the two regulators have been merged together. Safety is our absolute priority. There is a big cost-safety interdependency but safety always has to come first. In that sense, it is a useful restructuring and it is good to have an agenda and management team that are committed to doing more on the commercial side, while keeping safety as the absolute priority and managing that.
Employee engagement with the other players in the airport is something that we would not deal with at board level. That would be addressed at operational level so we would not see that. To answer the question at a slightly different level, as I said earlier, I did a lot of work in my former role as managing partner around culture and engagement, right down to how we engage with each other and with the outside world, including with our clients, obviously and most importantly. What is done reflects on the organisation and I want to work with the CEO and management team to think about how we can do that better. A lot of it is communication. One of the things that came out in our staff survey, as commonly does in such surveys, which I would have seen in my other lives, is the need for better communication and particularly communication of our values. I am answering the Senator's question at a very high level because there is a lot of detail in that. I have an ambition that the company will have, and I am not saying it does not have, a culture that is good to deal with. Obviously-----
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