Michael Ring (Mayo, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

It is like the races. Is the clock on? It is.

I take this opportunity to thank and congratulate my colleague, the Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport, Deputy Paschal Donohoe. I have seen how hard he has worked in the Department in recent months on this issue. I also compliment and thank the officials within the Department for the work, effort and commitment they have put in with the Minister.

This is a different deal to the deal offered several months ago. The Minister, Deputy Donohoe, has been a skilful negotiator. He has done a great job for the country. I wish to compliment him publicly in the Dáil today.

I believe this is good deal for Ireland, Aer Lingus and the workers. In the next year we will have 150 new jobs. In the coming years we will have 635 new jobs. I listened to Deputy Calleary and he is correct in what he says. I am a supporter of Aer Lingus and I have always been but I want to go back a little because he reminded me of something. As a Minister of State I went around this country as well as Britain and America. I talked to our diaspora there and asked them to come back to Ireland again. The one common denominator among our diaspora was the sense of how they were ripped off by Aer Lingus, particularly at the most sensitive time, for example, if a mother, father, brother or sister had died in this country. If they wanted to get a flight out of New York, then, by God, did they pay for the flight out of New York.

I speak as Minister of State with responsibility for tourism. I assure the House that capacity has increased in recent years. We have 40% new capacity into this country. That is why we have more and more visitors coming in. I offer some figures for today. Overall trips to Ireland for the first three months of this year have been up by 13.5% on the same three months last year. A total of 1,778,000 people came into this country to visit us. The figures from North America were up by 20%. Visitor figures from mainland Europe were up by 14.7% and visitor figures from the rest of the world increased by 23.6%. The reason this happened is because we have more carriers, more airlines and more competition in this country.

I remember two years ago when the Shannon Airport debt was taken over by the Government and the Shannon authority handed over the independent running of the airport. Deputy Calleary will remember that Deputy Dooley and Fianna Fáil sent out a press release to the effect that Knock Airport was the big winner, that Shannon was finished and that we would never see another flight into Shannon. What has happened?

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