John Lahart (Dublin South West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

There is a common theme running through the debate and it seems to be at the expense of Dublin, so I will put some of the case for Dublin. I know the Minister is a Dublin Deputy as well as a Minister, but often in the Dáil Chamber there is a very unbalanced debate.

I never knew I had so many cabin crew and pilots in my constituency until Covid came along. The situation as of mid-September was as follows in respect of Aer Lingus. The August operation - in other words, the total number of flights as opposed to the total number of passengers - out of Dublin was just below 40% of the August 2019 level. The biggest challenge facing Aer Lingus, according to pilots, is the North Atlantic. They say the mood music now is that the reopening of the United States to tourist traffic will not happen until at least November. That is bad news for pilots and cabin crew and for tourism in Dublin. This has led to a delay in starting transatlantic flights from Aer Lingus's new base in Manchester. In Europe, as the Minister will be aware, passengers have been generally slower to come back than had been anticipated. We welcome around Dublin city the sound of new voices, and continental voices are returning slowly to the streets. However, anybody with the eyes to see and the ears to hear will know that the city has been absolutely decimated in the past 18 months. We discovered when the tide went out that that tide related to tourism and business tourism. When it went out, grass started growing on the streets of Dublin, and we need to address that.

Some of the consequences I wish to focus on, one or two of which have been raised already, relate to the cost of doing business. That has been raised so I will just reinforce it. The food offering generally in the country has diminished, probably because of the skills that are unavailable. I raised this with the Minister, Deputy Humphreys, this morning in the different context of the need for training. Many restaurants in Dublin are half-empty, not because they cannot get customers but because they have insufficient kitchen staff to cope with the level of demand and can organise only a certain number of covers as a result. As Deputy Calleary said, some of the chickens are coming home to roost in respect of a complete lack of training and an utter reliance on foreign workers, including students, to come here to work part-time, which included an exploitative element. Yet we keep building hotels in Dublin. It keeps moving on. It baffles me at this stage.

Furthermore, our university system was reliant to some degree on the fees paid by international students. Those international students have dried up as a source of income and a source of work. We can see it around the city. I refer to the displaced staff, particularly in hospitality and restaurants. The Minister, Deputy Humphreys, and I spoke about that this morning as well. I refer to people who left hospitality and have left it for good because it became so uncertain in the past 18 months that people could not bank on it as certain employment for them into the future. Skilled chefs, kitchen staff and waiters have left and taken up employment in other areas. It is not just a question of the tourists coming back in numbers; we have a big job ahead of us in re-equipping our hospitality industry and our aviation industry to face the consequences of a post-Covid environment.

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