Brendan Ryan (Labour)

On a far more serious note, I agree with Senator O'Toole. My experience of that particular Department concerns two successive years in the 1980s when an educational tour to Ireland by a secondary school in Britain was almost disrupted because two of the 15 year old pupils were refused visitors' visas to come here by the Department of Justice. They were 15 year old Asians who were coming here with their school. On two successive years I was approached, on one occasion by three members of the House of Commons who asked what sort of a country it was that would stop kids coming with their school on an educational tour. To put it gently that Department is peculiar. It needs to be looked at seriously and to have explained to it that the order of governance is that the Oireachtas picks the Government and the Government runs the Department, not that the Department runs the Government which in turns runs the Oireachtas, which seems to be the illusion under which the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform operates. It severely needs to remember its place which is that it is there to serve others, not to be served by others.

I would like a clear statement from the Government about, not the assurances of the Minister for Transport who never comes into this House, but the future of publicly owned airports in the light of this week's decision by the European Commission. It was interesting that last week's edition of The Economist, before this decision was made, suggested there was a simple solution to the Ryanair-Charleroi problem, namely to privatise all the publicly owned airports. Given the clear agenda of the Minister for Transport, it immediately raises the question of whether he believes the solution to all these problems is to privatise the airports because his current policy is a step in that direction. What is the Government's position on the publicly owned airports, particularly those outside Dublin?