John O'Donoghue (Kerry South, Fianna Fail)

Deputy Deenihan has outlined the facts in regard to Kerry Airport eloquently and there is no need for me to reiterate them. However, this much must be added. There are salutary lessons to be learned from the behaviour and performance of Ryanair at Kerry Airport. In 2008 Ryanair made a bid for the PSO contract at the airport in order to run flights three times a day from Dublin to Kerry and back again. It did so by undercutting the price of Aer Arann, which was then operational and successful at the airport. It removed Aer Arann from the route by an old method which is known as predatory pricing. It resulted in Aer Arann getting out of the marketplace in so far as the Dublin-Kerry route was concerned and being replaced by Ryanair. Ryanair replaced Aer Arann with three enormous aeroplanes on the route comprising 189 passengers per plane. I doubt if it filled the aeroplane on any day. In any event, we are into the third year and Ryanair is to pull the plug on Kerry Airport and says it will not fly the route three times a day any more, but only once a day.

It is very clear what has happened. Aer Arann went into examinership. Ryanair saw that the coast was clear and decided that it would then leave Kerry Airport for the most part and retain one flight per day, and do so on a commercial basis without the aid of the PSO. Interestingly, in its statement to the press Ryanair said that it did not believe the public service obligation should exist any longer. So much for Ryanair's commitment to regionalisation. It was, I suppose, a purely commercial decision but the predatory nature of it is something of which all governments should take heed.

Monopolies in dominant positions in the marketplace are always undesirable. They are always dangerous, and they always end up with a sad tale. This is a particularly sad tale, as Deputy Deenihan has outlined, because of the serious adverse consequences it has on tourism and commerce for the people of County Kerry. Ryanair did not simply walk out of County Kerry. It did leave a commercial route, as it stated, to Dublin each day and operates international flights from the airport. In the interest of balance I will say that much of the work done by Mr. O'Leary and Ryanair in this country has been fairly laudable. However, I find some of their practices to be despicable and in this particular instance it cannot be described as anything other than despicable.

The company was obliged to give the Government three months' notice of its intention to leave Kerry County Airport. It decided to give no notice whatsoever. It waited until the contract was beginning to run out — next July — and when it saw that it could possibly get away with it without perhaps being sued, it simply upped and left. That is not good enough and it is not acceptable.

As an island nation we must think very deeply about the way we are going to deal with aviation and the kind of policies we will keep and implement for the future because if we are going to allow monopolies in dominant positions in the marketplace decide the future of our people, in so far as aviation is concerned, the future of our people, particularly in the regions of this country, and more particularly in the peripheral regions, is fairly bleak.

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