Mr. Michael O'Leary:

My 15-year-old went on his rugby tour last year. He had a Ryanair flight to Barcelona over the Easter weekend. Things have dramatically changed. Flights to Barcelona are a damn sight cheaper than the ferry to Liverpool was in our day. It is one of the great successes of the European Union. Low-fare air travel has been one of the great successes. A reason the Irish economy transformed in the past 20 or 30 years is low-cost air access. That is just not Ryanair - Aer Lingus, to be fair, has responded very well. We have a world-leading aviation industry here, but we just cannot keep a world-leading aviation industry if we have this absurd traffic cap at our main airport, where we just opened a second runway that allows us to grow to 60 million passengers a year.