Ruairí Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I reiterate what Deputy O'Rourke and other members of my party have said, that we support the Air Navigation and Transport Bill 2020 but will bring forward amendments on Committee Stage. We support the Bill on the basis that this is a streamlining of the regulatory system, that is, the Commission for Aviation Regulation being subsumed into the Irish Aviation Authority, and the Institute for Air Navigation Services, IANS, which is the for-profit section, dealing with air navigation services, being paid for through landing charges. This is best practice. Some of our amendments will relate to the fact that we need to make sure it is fit for capacity and is fully resourced. I welcome, as many Members have, the Minister of State's statement that what needs to be done will be done. We merely need to ensure that that happens.

Others have already spoken about consumers' rights. I would add to their voice that we need to ensure that we give capacity to this outfit to be able to deliver. During this pandemic we have seen issues, not only relating to consumers' rights but workers' rights. Deputy O'Reilly brought up the fact that Aer Lingus workers were not able to avail of shorter working week payments because they were not facilitated by Aer Lingus and that we need Government and departmental nous to be brought to bear to fix that retrospectively for workers who have been waiting on some of those payments for quite a considerable amount of time. Others have spoken about the fact that Ryanair has not paid out, particularly on group bookings, some of which are school g7roup bookings. It said it will deal with the individual who paid but there could be varying costs to some of these tickets that were bought in bulk. It is utterly disingenuous of Ryanair. It needs to be sorted. We need to ensure that we give a body such as this the capacity to deal with such issues.

We all accept the absolute necessity of connectivity and of the maintenance of an aviation sector beyond this pandemic. We fully support restrictions and guidelines as well as quarantining, on which there have been calls from my party to ensure happens and becomes a reality as soon as possible.

I spoke to the Minister, Deputy Ryan, about dealing with all the stakeholders, be they the airlines, the airports or the representatives of the pilots and the other workers, from the point of view of ensuring we look after their rights and give them the capacity to get through this pandemic so that we have a system and a service that will operate for us afterwards.

We are an island and we have difficulties. I would add that we need to make sure there is transfer of traveller information, North and South, for people coming in so that we can try to put an all-island response together as quickly as possible.

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