Gerald Nash (Louth, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to discuss this important issue for us, as an island nation. It directly affects several thousand workers and families in my constituency of Louth and east Meath. There is a concentration of aviation workers in these areas. There are people who depend for their livelihoods on Dublin Airport, and the aviation sector more generally, in Drogheda, Laytown, Bettystown, Mornington and Julianstown. I know the Minister of State will be aware of that.

As my colleagues and the Minister of State and her senior ministerial colleague articulated, we all understand the impact the pandemic has had on livelihoods and prospects for those who are working in this critical sector. The impact has been human and real. Not a week passes that I am not contacted by an Aer Lingus, Ryanair or DAA worker who is worried about the outsourcing of his or her job and tells me how difficult it is to make ends meet. These people tell me of their worries about making the mortgage payment or paying the rent and heating their home.

The truth is that this Government has, to a degree, supported individual airlines, notably Aer Lingus, through the crisis with State support and many millions in low-cost loans. We have, however, missed an opportunity again and again to attach any kind of conditionality to the low-cost, long-term loans and other forms of State support, such as the employment wage subsidy scheme, previously the temporary wage subsidy scheme, that were given to the likes of Aer Lingus and other organisations operating in the aviation sector. We have, in many ways, socialised the costs of bailing out and supporting the airline sector and all we have had in return is more cost-cutting, the closure of bases and the culling of staff, alongside empty claims of solidarity and tokenistic gestures from airlines.

This is a real failure of Government policy. There was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to attach requirements around working conditions, pay and so on as a condition of State support. That is done routinely in modern, social democratic countries, such as Germany where conditions are attached to State support. What we got instead was thousands of short-term lay-offs, confusion around the provision of social welfare for workers who were caught in the eye of this particular storm and the reality of outsourcing and so on in a critical sector. I proposed in some detail last year that the employment wage subsidy scheme be reimagined and placed on a firmer footing based on the German Kurzarbeit model. We could have a new wage subsidy scheme as a permanent feature of the labour market to assist industries, such as aviation, to recover.

We know, belatedly, that the Government is engaging in discussions with the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, with which I remain close on these issues, to seek to introduce such a measure to assist aviation, which will, as we know, be one of the last sectors to fully recover. There is no sign of any detail on that particular scheme. We have made provision in the Labour Party's fully costed alternative budget proposition, published yesterday, for the introduction of such a scheme. That will become a more permanent feature of the labour market because we know that it is difficult to recover jobs when they are lost. When a sector sheds jobs, it is difficult for that sector to recover. We were in danger of losing decades worth of skill sets within a sector that is crucial for our country. It is crucial that supports are provided but conditions around pay, terms and conditions of employment, upskilling and retraining should be attached to any future supports.

I turn to the issue of refunds for cancellations caused by Covid-19. It is not only workers who have been affected by the pandemic; customers have also borne the brunt of the crisis. We have seen airlines refuse to refund up to 400,000 customers, including many hard-pressed families who had their holidays rescheduled in good faith, in line with public health guidelines. Some airlines have been easier to deal with than others and I think all Deputies will have represented families who had difficulties with airlines to help recover the moneys owed. It was clear that those moneys were always owed and belonged to customers. The process has been frustrating, to say the least. I have raised this matter through parliamentary questions on many occasions over the past year or so.

2 o’clock

Again, this is something that really should not have happened and it would not have if the Government was clear on the kind of conditions and behaviour it expected from the aviation industry in return for State support. I welcome last week's decision by a group of 16 European airlines, including Ryanair, to refund passengers whose flights were cancelled during the Covid-19 pandemic. These airlines have committed to providing better information on passengers' rights in the future. Talk is cheap. We have previously seen airlines renege on such promises with regards to refunds and customer service improvements, so enforcement will be essential. I call on both Ministers responsible for this area to ensure that there is proper enforcement of this agreement and that ordinary families and holidaymakers, who save hard for holidays, are treated with respect and receive their long-overdue refunds.

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