Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael)

The regional airports and the airlines are private entities. As such, I cannot give the Deputy any guarantees on behalf of regional airports or airlines. However, I can say that the PSO for Donegal has been submitted to the European Commission as also has the PSO for Kerry. The money is available for those services and it is a Government objective that those PSOs should be in place by the end of the year. It is anticipated that the advertisement will be published in the Official Journal of the European Union by the end of this month or early next month. It is then up to the airlines to put in bids to operate those services and I hope they will do so.

Last year, 2010, the budget provided €21 million for support to regional airports and this provided for approximately 1.3 million passenger journeys at a subsidy of €40 per passenger. This year's budget was cut from €21 million to €13.4 million so the money available to support regional airports is considerably less this year than last year because of the decisions made in the last budget. There will be pressure to find a mechanism to continue to support regional airports within that spending context.

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