Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, Socialist Party) | Oireachtas source

That is perfect. I may not take the full 15 minutes. The first point I wish to make is on the incredible method the Government has chosen to debate this extremely important issue. The so-called democratic revolution is now so covered with dust that no one could possibly see it. This is a most cynical attempt to rush through the full and complete privatisation of Aer Lingus. We had a Government decision on Tuesday night, following stonewalling during Leaders' Questions earlier that day, and the whole thing is to be done and dusted by mid-afternoon today.

It is patently a transparent and cynical attempt to get the sale through before the pressure mounts, on the Labour Party Deputies, in particular. One also has to raise the question of its timing and relationship to the successful and marvellous referendum result at the weekend. The Labour Party thinks it has got a boost from it and now has some political capital that it feels able to quickly rush this deal through on the back of it. Seven of the so-called "Aer Lingus Eight" in the Labour Party dissolved when faced with what was just a repetition of the same empty guarantees, the same empty promises and non-existent vetos. This is just an attempt to prevent the pressure from building up on them to vote in line with their promises and what is meant to be their political position, rather than with Fine Gael and the neoliberal position driving to full privatisation.

The guarantees, promises and commitments mean nothing - they are worthless. The Aer Lingus workers and pensioners will not need to be convinced of this, having had multiple examples of the same thing in their own history such as the related case of the Team Aer Lingus workers, whose company was privatised in 1997 and handed over to SR Technics, a profitable business, only to be closed with 1,300 jobs lost in 2013 and moved to Zurich where more profits could be made. There has also been a sell-out of Aer Lingus pensioners, a collection of workers who are used to being sold out. In this case, the Government is not even selling them out for 30 pieces of silver - it is effectively getting nothing. It is entering into a sale at a knock-down price. A company with cash reserves and Heathrow Airiport slots, with a combined value of approximately €1.5 billion, is being sold off for €1.4 billion. The taxpayer will receive slightly more than €300 million of this, which is a drop in the ocean in terms of the Government's finances and all that is being given up, while the executives between them will receive an estimated €30 million. No wonder they are in favour of and advocating the sale.

The embarrassing reality for the Government is exposed by the Nyras report which indicates that the logic of privatisation is a race to the bottom in competition with other companies. It includes a mention of the need for €60 million worth of cuts in order to be competitive. It recommends cutting jobs among pilots and cabin crew by 10% and among catering staff by 25%, brutal cuts, but that is what will follow when IAG assumes ownership. The fact that Aer Lingus is compared to Easyjet and Vueling is an indication of precisely how the logic of the race to the bottom works - it only pushes downwards.

Now that we have the report, if the Government had any shame, it would delay the vote until everybody had sight of it and its implications could be digested. It will not do this because it does not have any shame. We should not be surprised by what is contained in the report. IAG is made up of shareholders such as Blackrock, the world's largest asset management company, and hedge funds such as Lansdowne Partners which are only interested in profit. They are not interested in connectivity, jobs or the conditions of those at work. They are only interested in shareholder value, which means short-term profitability and whatever they need to do to get it. This is not an abstract debate about what might happen if IAG were to take over a major national airline. We only have to look at the example of Iberia where the same thing happened and 4,500 jobs were lost - the equivalent of between 1,000 and 1,200 jobs in Aer Lingus.

The Government, including the Tánaiste during Leaders' Questions, has made a lot of the B share. It has used the word "veto" repeatedly and stated the share will give the State the right to veto the sale of the slots at any future stage. That is on extremely shaky territory and I do not think the B share will be worth the paper on which it is written. There is extensive European Court of Justice case law dealing with the question of golden shares, including the sale of airlines such as British Airways. In general, the European Court of Justice has ruled against golden shares, stating they threaten the free movement of capital. If it came before the court, it is likely that the same ruling would be made. Government Deputies do not have to believe me about this; they can believe the Deputy Pat Rabbitte of old. To be precise, when dealing with the privatisation of 75% of Aer Lingus under Fianna Fáil in April 2006, he said:

The second deception relates to the pretence that the Minister for Transport is retaining a golden share. The Minister and the Taoiseach know the European Court of Justice rejected as illegal the ownership of a minority golden share which would protect strategic interests. In the case of the UK Government’s golden share in the airport operator, BAA, it was ruled illegal under EU law in May 2003. The golden share had special voting rights attached to it and sought to give Ministers the final say in major decisions such as selling the airport. The European Court of Justice ruled on this matter that it is illegal to use the golden share for protection of strategic interests. The Taoiseach is so confident about the decision made, but it is a surprise to most people that the Progressive Democrats has pushed Fianna Fáil so far to the right that it would be unthinkable even a decade ago that Fianna Fáil would have sold off the national airline in a country that has the strategic requirements of an island nation.

That is damning. It is damning of the argument of the Government about the B share and means that the Labour Party knows full well that it is entirely worthless and there is not the veto about which they speak. It also knows that even if the European Court of Justice were to state formally that we could use the argument to say Aer Lingus has to hold onto it for the protection of a strategic interest, there is nothing a future Government could do to prevent the slots from being leased to a subsidiary of IAG. It is also damning in terms of the Labour Party. It would have been unthinkable, even a decade ago when Deputy Pat Rabbitte was speaking, that the Labour Party would have completed the sell-off of the national airline in a country that had the strategic requirements of an island nation. Unfortunately, it would not have been so unthinkable because the road the Labour Party had travelled to the right towards the embrace of neoliberalism was quite clear at that stage.

The essential excuse of the Labour Party is that 75% is gone and 25% is somewhat worthless and we may as well go the whole way. It is the same logic used by somebody who beats someone to within a few inches of his or her life and then justifies killing him or her because he or she was nearly dead. It does not hold any water to say that, because Fianna Fáil got rid of 75% of the airline, we have no choice but to get rid of the rest of it.

The Labour Party seems determined not just to dig its own grave but aslo to climb into it by going along with this right-wing agenda of privatisation while dressing it up, as the Tánaiste did, as being somehow to do with the interests of consumers. It is the same right-wing Thatcherite logic that says only private business can provide for consumers, whereas state ownership is always inefficient. Those trade unions which still fund the Labour Party with their members' money in order to put the boot into their own members' interests should draw the conclusions of this. They should read the writing on the wall and follow through on the the words of Mr. Jack O'Connor of SIPTU by withdrawing funding from and support for a Labour Party which is determined to act against the interests of working people and the tradition on which it was built.

What is the alternative? The argument put forward is that there are two options. We can retain 25%, which is worth something but is not a decisive stake in the company as Aer Lingus is now run as a private company on a for-profit basis, or we can get rid of the 25% and have the company consolidated into IAG. There is, however, a third option which was well expressed by Mr. Paul Sweeney of TASC, the financial adviser of the trade union group within Aer Lingus. If, in 2006, the Labour Party was opposed to the sell-off of 75% and the loss of a majority stake, it should reverse the process and strive to at least have an ownership figure of 50.1% by buying up the Ryanair shares, ultimately leading us back to full public ownership of Aer Lingus.

That is the real choice. The first choice involves Aer Lingus becoming a minor subsidiary of a huge multinational corporation driven by short-term shareholder value, that is, short-term profits, and the State losing out in terms of jobs, connectivity and the strategic interests of the Irish economy as a whole. The other choice is public ownership. With public ownership, one can bring the workers to the fore in decision-making in the company, in addition to the interests of the passengers on Aer Lingus flights. Most important, one could bring the strategic, long-term interests of the economy and society as a whole to the fore. Otherwise, it is just a game of short-term profit-making. The shareholders of IAG have no interest in or concern for the long-term strategic interests of Ireland in terms of investment and everything else. The only way to guarantee these is to return to full public and democratic ownership of Aer Lingus.

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