Joe Costello (Dublin Central, Labour)

This is a very bad day for Aer Lingus and the country. It is strange that Fianna Fáil could only bring in one backbencher from the northside to speak in the debate. Only one of the 11 backbenchers has turned up. There is a Government slot after we speak going a begging but where are all the Government backbenchers? It is obvious they are not too happy to stand behind what the Minister, Deputy Cullen, is doing.

This proposal is not out of character when one considers what has been done in the past nine years. The Fianna Fáil-Progressive Democrats Government is privatisation mad. The PD tail has been wagging the Fianna Fáil poodle for over nine years. The Tánaiste, Deputy Harney, has done an inventory of all lands in the Department of Health and Children with a view to selling them for a private sector tax incentive development. The Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform, Deputy McDowell, sold his offices in St. Stephen's Green for €52 million and now he is a wandering Minister getting temporary accommodation down the street. The Minister of State, Deputy Parlon, in the key Office of Public Works, is busily engaged in selling all the State properties he can lay his hands on and buying property throughout the country at exorbitant prices for his so-called programme of decentralisation. We have the ex officio fourth PD Minister, Deputy Cullen, engaged in the sale of the century but Aer Lingus is very different. This sale is an issue of the utmost national importance and it is disingenuous of the Government to say it will retain 25.1% of the shares to protect key strategic interests.

When the Irish Sugar Company was privatised some years ago the State retained 30.4% of the shares. However, it had to dispose of all of those shares within two years. If it was not able to protect its own shareholding it had little chance of protecting the strategic interest of the Irish sugar industry, its employees and the sugar beet farmers. The entire industry has gone to the wall.

There is scarcely any need to rehearse the more recent debacle of Eircom when the citizens of this country were induced into purchasing worthless shares and venture capitalists, or vulture capitalists, took control, fragmented the company and instead of injecting the promised equity, starved it of funds and left the telecommunications industry here in a shambles.

This is a real scandal of privatisation. This Government is on its last legs. Next year, with a little luck, we will be burying it and a suitable epitaph would be, "In a time of plenty it sold all the family silver it could get its greedy hands on".

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