Mr. Joe Hamill:

Certainly looking at it from that perspective, it is not a good story to tell. I fully accept that. I can probably only go back to what I said earlier in that when the idea was developed it was done so very much as part of a strategy at the time to develop transport infrastructure for the islands. It was put into the national development plan around 2003 and the strategy was to undertake major developments of island infrastructure. It was developed in that context. It was a very different time. The allocation to the islands in one year then was around €40 million. As I mentioned earlier, it is about €600,000 now.

I have to say there was a change in the circumstances at that time. I will give an example, although it is a bit of an extreme example. The passenger traffic to the largest of the Aran Islands - the Deputy is probably aware of this - exceeds 250,000 passengers every year, the number that make that short trip. The Department worked at the time with Fáilte Ireland around the idea of promoting the islands as a destination. We were involved in developing web-based information around promoting islands as special places and part of the strategy around that was to build up the methods of access. It was part of a wider story. Around that time we developed the sea transport access routes to quite a large number of non-Gaeltacht islands that had not had them previously, and many of those are still there. We have about 22 sea-based services to islands. The only air-based services that are there are the ones that were there from the beginning, which are those to the Aran Islands. I would put it in that broader context. A lot of investment was being put into island infrastructure at the time. This was part of it. Without jumping the gun on procurement or anything else like that, there was a possibility that the Aran Islands services might have been expanded in some way to include that Clifden-Inisbofin leg of the route.