Joe Higgins (Dublin West, Socialist Party)

Not only is the Minister guilty of treachery in sabotaging the future of the national airline, but he is cheating the taxpayer by allowing the grubby international financiers to take the benefit of what has been created over decades by Irish workers and the Irish people. Why is he crying "foul" at Ryanair's attempt when he must have known from the beginning that the law of the Stock Exchange is that the shark with the biggest snout goes in for the kill, and so it has? Did his advisers tell him this was possible and if so, why did he not take pre-emptive action? We want a clear answer to that. If they did not, why were they paid tens of millions of euro?

Let us not make scapegoats. The Minister for Transport who presided over this disaster on behalf of the Government also presided over the situation where the Government sits on €60 million worth of useless electronic voting machines. Some computer users in Holland recently hacked into machines like these and played cartoons on them — how appropriate. They should be brought into the Cabinet room of the Irish Government because while its Members might be able to comprehend the intellectual abilities of Mickey Mouse, they are failing on everything else. This is a major fiasco, following on the fiasco that last week left 40,000 telephone subscribers of another privatised industry without a telephone service. Will Deputy Cowen throw the 3,500 workers around the stock exchanges of the world like a sack of spuds? Apart from squawking to international and national competition authorities, what will he do? I demand that he take Aer Lingus back into public ownership and answer the question why he reduced the stakeholding if he knew this attack was imminent.

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