Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I wish to speak to the amendment put forward by Solidarity-People Before Profit. We tabled it because the motion does not adequately address the issues in aviation and the impacts the crisis is having on workers and on climate change. On at least four occasions in recent weeks, representatives from the aviation industry have appeared before either the Special Committee on Covid-19 Response or the Joint Committee on Transport and Communications Networks. I have repeatedly heard their demands for increased state aid and for the relaxation of the public health guidelines. I have also been repeatedly told how safe airline travel is in the midst of a pandemic.

We know that since the crisis began there has been huge hardship for workers in the aviation industry, with massive job lay-offs, forced redundancies, pay cuts, reduced hours and the wholesale tearing up of contracts, rights and conditions. It has been galling in the extreme to know that the companies and CEOs loudly proclaiming their concern for workers are the same ones that are simultaneously putting the boot into them. The contempt these companies have shown is breathtaking. I will give two examples. The concern of Aer Lingus management for the company's workers could not even extend to filling out simple social welfare forms in a timely fashion. This left many of them without any income for weeks. Meanwhile, Ryanair has to date used the crisis to force many staff to sign new contracts and has sacked at least eight trade union activists across its European operation. Another company has been reported to have implemented similar pay cuts, selective redundancies, etc.

As a result of this, I take the attitude of the CEOs and management of these companies with a large pinch of salt when they demand further state aid and help for their industry and workers. Their demand seems to be that we should get back to normal and that we should not make too much of the public health situation. These very companies, which posted billions of euro in profits just last year, did not display any initiative or take any action in the context of setting up rapid testing at airports. We are told that we may have such testing soon, ten months into the crisis. It is incredible that only now are we doing what many other states and regions have been doing in the context of rapid testing.

We cannot look to a model for aviation that simply says we should get back to normal, expand airports, build more runways and get people flying. The elephant in the room is climate change and that changes everything. We need an aviation industry and connectivity, both as an island nation and regionally, but looking for a model of the free market and competition between dozens of airlines based on never-ending expansion is lunacy. It is not sustainable and will not deliver in the long term for secure employment or for health and safety. Such a model cannot be supported as we accelerate into a worsening climate crisis. We cannot somehow use clever accountancy trickery to ignore greenhouse gas emissions from aviation as if they does not reach the atmosphere in the same way as CO2. This is why the idea of a just transition becomes so important and why the treatment by this and other Governments of the Bord na Móna workers is so alarming. Just transition is what is needed for the aviation industry and we must see the role of the State as being paramount to that.

I am alarmed that the State has seen it fit to appoint as the CEO of the Irish Aviation Authority a former CEO of Ryanair. It is like making the poacher the gamekeeper and I would like to ask the Minister of State to address that. Why has the State appointed, as head of an authority that is supposed to oversee the health and safety of the industry and consumer rights, put the former CEO of Ryanair, which does not have a great reputation on either count, in as the head of the authority. I leave the Minister of State with that question.

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