Pat Breen (Clare, Fine Gael)

As a Clare Deputy, I take great pride in Shannon international airport. It is our second largest airport and provides European and US access to the west. It is critical to tourism and economic progress in the mid-west and the greater west of Ireland. The opportunities and threats of open skies have been evaluated in an independent study carried out by Dukes and Sorenson and by many other commentators. I have always said the open skies policy will have many benefits for Aer Lingus and particularly for Dublin and the east coast, but it will have few benefits for Shannon. Where open skies policies operate in European countries, evidence shows the majority of airlines fly into capital cities.

We all support balanced regional development and Shannon is an ideally placed airport and is the perfect example of what regional development stands for. Dublin Airport is choked with traffic and anybody who transited through the airport in recent times will have experienced this chaos. It can be a terrible experience for overseas visitors. Shannon still has a spare capacity of 2 million even though passenger numbers were up 35% in 2005 as a result of Ryanair's arrival. Transatlantic business in 2005 was worth €25 million in revenue terms to the region and revenue spent in the region by the North American visitor was worth nearly €300 million.

The year round transatlantic services underpin the regional US industrial investment of over €35 billion to the west. Some 50% of industry in the Shannon free zone is American and it is there because we have a year round direct transatlantic service. Unfortunately, we have a Minister for Transport who cares little for the west and panders to the Dublin business lobby and Aer Lingus.

Aer Lingus has no interest in Shannon Airport or in developing new routes out of the airport. It has no local management and it is managed out of Cork. No sooner had the ink dried following the signing of the EU-US open skies agreement when the airline announced new US routes out of Dublin to San Francisco, Florida and Washington, but no routes out of Shannon. It is very sad to see the route map in the Cara magazine, particularly the European route map with just one service out of Shannon to London Heathrow compared to the huge network out of Cork and Dublin. Even Aer Lingus crews in Shannon face an uncertain future with much chopping and changing in their rosters recently.

We in the mid-west always realised the open skies policy would be implemented but it should be introduced in an ordered way with a three year lead-in period and funding for tourism promotion should be in place to assist the challenges of such a policy. The Minister had a golden opportunity tonight to announce the implementation of the tourism and development plan but he failed to do so. I challenge him when he visits the region on Friday to announce this plan and provide the airport with a level playing pitch. We have had enough of the Minister's photo opportunities. We need action. The Minister has failed the people of the mid-west and has delivered nothing but misery to the region. On "Prime Time" tonight, the Minister's colleague, the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government, Deputy Roche, was called Pontius Pilate because he washed his hands of the Galway water crisis, but this Minister will go down as the modern day Pontius Pilate who plundered the west.

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