Joe Higgins (Dublin West, Socialist Party)

The Taoiseach has broken his new year's resolution on his first day back. I asked him a number of precise questions. Judging by newspaper articles I read recently, the staff at the National Museum got more information out of Clonycavan man, and the poor man was dead for 2,000 years in a bog, than the Taoiseach has provided today. The Taoiseach is very much alive in front of me. I might call him neo-liberal man.

The Union Bank of Switzerland, one of the advisers on the future of Aer Lingus, stated the Government should move to privatise within six months. Recently, in a national newspaper, a spokesman for the Minister for Transport, Deputy Martin Cullen, was asked if the Government was prepared to follow the advisers' recommendations to conduct the initial public offering in the short term. Deputy Cullen's spokesman replied that Ministers were working to that agenda: "If the market conditions are right, the answer is yes". Will the Taoiseach confirm the Minister and the Government are working to a short-term privatisation and that it may happen this summer? I ask the Taoiseach to be clear as he knows the answers.

Is it appropriate that top management in Aer Lingus, which is owned by the community and the taxpayers, should be blatantly urging privatisation when they are likely to become millionaires within a few years of the process? Is there not a despicable conflict of interest here? Should they not be prohibited from doing so? I put my original questions again and ask the Taoiseach to provide answers very clearly.

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