Mr. Michael O'Leary:

-----16 million passengers. It is almost half the size of Dublin Airport. It is not government-owned but owned by the local city. There are many European airports, such as the eastern European airports, which are much more aggressive about growth, including in Poland and the Baltic states. We were the largest airline in Ukraine before the war. They do not struggle with the kind of planning challenges that we challenge with. We accept that we struggle with planning challenges but I do not accept that the Government cannot do anything about this for the next four years. When the air fares home at Christmas are €1,000 return, I want to point to the Minister for Transport and say that we told him this would happen. It can still be avoided if somebody directs the IAA to waive the cap or to allow us to add these extra flights at Christmas.

This is technical. Transatlantic is a different business to short-haul flying. In short-haul, whether in North America or Europe, nobody will pay for premium traffic anymore. There is no business class anymore. Nobody wants to show up in a business lounge at 7 a.m., as my father would have done 30 years ago, quaffing champagne before he went on the red-eye flight or pie-eyed flight to London, but you paid about £209 return because you were not staying on Saturday night. Now people want to show up at the airport. They do not want to check in a bag. They want to go straight through security, get on the plane, get there, get their job done and get home.

On long-haul, you still have to show up three hours beforehand. Some 20% of the passenger base will pay a gargantuan air fare. I was on a results roadshow about three weeks ago. I had to go to New York and North America for a week, visiting shareholders. I was going to do financial public relations in London. The return fare from London to New York, coming back to Dublin from Chicago with Aer Lingus, was £13,500 in business class. To be fair to Aer Lingus, if I had gone on the Sunday afternoon from Dublin to New York and come back on exactly the same flight from Chicago to Dublin early on Friday morning, it would have been about €4,500 or €5,000. Because we are a low fares airline, I went out on the Sunday with Aer Lingus and came back the following day. I will fly economy everywhere around Europe. I will not fly economy across the Atlantic. If I am coming back, I need to sleep. I want to get a shower when I arrive here and go and do a day's work. I will pay whatever that is.

With 20% of business on long-haul completely price insensitive because it is largely paid by passengers' employers, that high-yield traffic pays for all the rest of the aircraft. The economy stuff is the cream on top for those airlines. Nobody has yet demonstrated that rich people are willing to move from Dublin to depart from Knock and land in Rhode Island. They will not do it because, historically, they have always gone from Dublin to JFK International Airport, Heathrow to JFK or Frankfurt to JFK, and that is the way that long-haul works. It is just a different business model.