Noel Dempsey (Meath West, Fianna Fail)

The Deputy does not want to hear this. It did not sound as if he knew about it. He asked me why there were suspensions and I am telling him. It is because people who are well paid decided that they could go into work and not do what they were being asked to do, and challenge management because of another dispute they were having with regard to a 6% pay increase. That is why the suspensions took place. This is not a disaster which befell us but rather something these people decided they would do. The kind of operation they have been asked to undertake is work which they have been doing up to now. One of them, a scheme called the cross-runway operation, was done by them up to two years ago but they did not need to continue it because there was talk of putting in place a parallel runway. As that has been deferred they were asked to go back to the cross-runway operation but they have refused to do so. That is one of the disputes, and the others involve equally ridiculous reasons for going on strike. If people want to start pointing the finger, as the Deputy seems to, they should point it in the right direction.

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