Pearse Doherty (Sinn Fein)

I, too, would welcome debate on rendition flights and the use of Irish air space to accommodate this atrocious practice. The issue is not as straightforward as Members on the Government side suggest. When this debate was running in Donegal during the general election, two former Ministers of State in the Department of Transport, one with responsibility in the area of aviation, supported rendition flights in Ireland and called for regional airports to accommodate such flights. We need debate on the issue and we need to clear up whether their expressed opinions were just slips of the tongue, they did not understand what was happening or they knew more than they were letting on.