Timmy Dooley (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State to the House. She does not need me to tell her the state of the aviation sector. It is absolutely on its knees, and she knows that through the work she does every day. It is not just the aviation sector, as all the ancillary businesses that have other customers but which were predominantly serving the aviation sector are also in a state of free fall. I have first-hand experience of this because there is an international airport located in the constituency I come from, namely, Shannon Airport. It is a microcosm of international aviation activity the world over at the moment. There are airlines, aviation companies and companies that provide care and maintenance of aircraft, and they too have lost contracts and are struggling to survive.

To look at the core of the aviation sector in the first instance, others have talked about the length of time it will take the sector to get back to normal or get back to what were 2019 levels.That is estimated at being close to 2024 and it is dependent on when we get some level of activity back in the aviation sector. Maybe that will be later this year; maybe it will be next year. The critical thing the State is trying to do, through the supports the Minister of State talked about and with which I think it will have to go further, is to ensure those companies survive. When I talk about companies surviving, I am talking about their ability to retain staff, pay them and give them some level of income to get them through the difficult period. I am in contact on a daily basis with workers and small business owners who provide services at the airport. While they expected last autumn that there would be some chance of opening up around now or midsummer, that unfortunately has evaporated and its likelihood, as we all recognise from a public health perspective, is limited.

The next phase is to try to shore up the balance sheets of these companies and to protect them. Let us look at the biggest operators in the first instance: the two main airlines that serve the State. We need that competitive tension to ensure there will be an appropriate marketplace on the other side of this. I have advocated for quite some time that the Government should engage with both Ryanair and Aer Lingus and look to see how they can assist these companies through this period. No company can sustain continued losses the way they have. I think it would be appropriate for the State to look to take a shareholding, not necessarily a passive shareholding but one that guarantees the protection of strategic connectivity during the recreation phase of the aviation sector. I am not talking about nationalising. It is not like that. It is playing a role similar to what we did with our pillar banks. We identified that the two main banks and Permanent TSB at the time required State investment to protect the banking system and the economy. I would argue that Aer Lingus and Ryanair are two pillar airlines that provide connectivity to this island nation and we should give serious consideration to taking a stake or an interest and a shareholding that could be dispensed with and sold on in due course when these companies recover.

There is enormous pressure and anxiety in the minds of people who have not been working for the last year. They are barely able to make ends meet. In many cases, they are living on very significantly reduced income. Some are out of work and on the pandemic unemployment payment, PUP. We are not seeing support from our pillar banks to assist them with continued moratoriums recognising that these people want to work and would be working in any other sector if they were trained in it. They are holding on and hoping this sector will recover. We need greater engagement from the banks.

Allied and directly connected to the aviation sector is our tourism and hospitality sector. Somewhere between 150,000 and 250,000 people work in that sector, depending on the time of the year. We will have to do more for some of the operators in that sector who cannot take any more. They have reached an end point. I am talking about hotels, restaurants and that whole allied business. The State will have to provide greater supports or force the banks to show a greater level of forbearance in relation to outstanding loans.

We all talk about the planes and aircraft but other businesses are affected. There are people involved in leasing and car hire at the airports, ground-handling staff, people who load and unload baggage and people who work in refuelling. All of these people are effectively out of work and in a dire and desperate state. Even if there was some recovery in the short term, we would still be looking at a prolonged period where the State will have to stand behind and beside this sector. It is the right thing to do for the people and businesses that are there and it is the right thing to do for the economy. Some of the bigger airlines will choose not to serve Ireland for, perhaps, the next two or three years until it is financially viable for them. That is why it is important to protect what we see as the indigenous sector so we are in control to some extent and we protect to the greatest extent possible the companies that serve and operate within our State. I look forward to proposals the Minister of State may bring forward in due course.