It is a tribute to the presentational skills of the Minister — and, indeed, the people of south-west Cork are lucky to have him as their representative — that he should come before Seanad Éireann today with a speech of this quality and be received seriously by this House. It is a tribute to the high regard in which we hold the Minister that, on foot of a speech like this, we are seriously considering a proposal to extend our approval to a State guarantee of the expenditure of a substantial sum of money. The Minister's speech is very long on problems and discussions about various airports throughout the country and very short on an analysis as to why we in Seanad Éireann should approve this proposed expenditure. It encourages the kind of twaddle we get in discussing whether there is food on the floor when, in fact, what we are discussing is whether we, in Seanad Éireann, should extend our approval to the State guaranteeing £25 million, because that is what we are discussing.
I have no objection to discussing the details of the operations of any individual airline and not very much was said today about these operations with which I disagree, but they are not what we are discussing. I recognise that if the Minister extends the scope of his speech in his introduction, it is very difficult to restrict Senators to discussing what should be discussed, that is, whether it is a good thing to extend a State guarantee for a sum of £25 million to Aer Rianta.
What is being discussed is a proposal, which apparently has already been decided by the Government, to approve an additional runway of over 8,000 feet for Dublin Airport. I do not know if that is a good idea or not. How could I, because there is absolutely no information here, or no information has been made available to me, on which I can base my decision. It may be the duty of the Government to decide these matters in principle. Aer Rianta as a State-sponsored body are entitled to make their own investment decisions. I have no duty in this regard except in so far as the State-sponsored body concerned come in here and seek my approval to the extension of a State guarantee. That is where my involvement is. If they want to invest £35 million, or £45 million, or £105 million from their own resources, in any investment they choose, subject to Government approval, the responsibility for that rests jointly on the Government of the day on the one hand and the board of Aer Rianta on the other. Good luck to them if they want to do it.
I am brought into the equation because, in the pursuance of my duty as a Member of this House, I am asked to approve a State guarantee. If I am asked to approve a State guarantee, it should be laid down in black and white why I should so approve that State guarantee. Why should I, as a Member of Seanad Éireann, agree to pledge taxpayers' money for a sum of £25 million? There may be very good reasons; the case may be unanswerable; the logic of the Minister's position may be overwhelming. I am not denying that these possibilities exist but what I am saying is that the information on which I can make the decision as to whether I agree or disagree with the Minister's decision is absent from the Minister's speech and therefore not available to me in this House.
We are not talking about Ryanair. We are not talking about Cork Airport. We are not talking about Shannon Airport or Knock Airport. We are talking about the justification or otherwise for spending £31.26 million on extending the facilities of Dublin Airport. Nowhere in this document is there any indication that there is any overcrowding whatsoever at Dublin Airport. For all I know, Dublin Airport is under-utilised at present. I am not saying these figures are not available. I am merely saying they are not available to me, and I have to make the decision. As long as I remain a Member of this House I will take my duties seriously, and I expect Ministers of whatever persuasion to come in here and give me a rational explanation of what they are proposing to do or what they are asking me to do. What they are asking me to do today is to stand four square behind a State guarantee of £25 million, that is, your money and my money, and they are asking me to do this on the basis of a presentation which is pathetic to say the least of it.
I am not blaming the Minister of State in that regard because I know he has his brief. I am blaming the whole apparatus of Government and the way in which these decisions were arrived at under this Administration and previous Administrations whereby State guarantees were extended to State companies on the flimsiest of explanations. We know what happened with regard to these matters in the past. We know the difficulties we got into with Irish Shipping. I will not go into the rights and wrongs or the political arguments about Irish Shipping. In the heel of the hunt State guarantees were put up and they had to be met. We had a similar situation with regard to Dublin Gas. I will not go into the arguments for or against the early or late nationalisation of Dublin Gas. As a Member of this House and over my objections, certain guarantees were given to Dublin Gas. The Government were not necessarily incorrect in giving those guarantees, but sufficient information was not given to me, as a Member of this House to make a reasoned and rational judgment on whether these State guarantees should be given.
I ask the members of the Government not here today, no doubt because they have many other important jobs to do, to listen to what I have to say on this question. When they were deciding whether to approve an extension for Dublin Airport, if the information with which they were presented in making that decision consisted only of the information which is in the Minister's speech, would they have approved that expenditure? There can be only one answer to that question. Of course they would not have approved it. They would not necessarily have said it was a bad idea. They would have asked for more information and more facts before making a decision.
There are a few points which could reasonably be made concerning this investment. There are three State airports in the country: Dublin, Cork and Shannon. There are a number of other private airports of which Knock Airport is the one with the biggest investment. I understand with regard to Cork Airport, Shannon Airport and Knock Airport — whether I agree with Knock Airport is not important at this point — that investment in those airports has a social as well as an economic dimension. There is a social reason why the airports are there and there is a social reason why Government money should be committed to them.
If there is any airport in this State which must stand or fall on its own economic base, that airport surely must be Dublin Airport. The reason I object is that this airport is being partly funded by taxpayers' money. The partial funding of this airport by the taxpayers is saying that the busiest and biggest airport in the State cannot be self-financing. I have no objection to funds being made available to Cork, to Shannon or to Knock: If you want to make funds available to Knock on the basis of social need that is your decision. But surely extensions to the biggest and busiest airport in the State should be capable of being financed without resort to taxpayers' money. Why is it necessary that 25 per cent of this should be provided by the Government, as mentioned by the Minister in his speech? He said the remaining 25 per cent will be provided by Seán Citizen. He calls it the Exchequer but it is really Seán Citizen. Seán Citizen will provide 25 per cent.
I see no good logical reason why an organisation which we are told has a trading surplus of £11.5 million cannot provide this out of its own resources. I recognise that in doing so it might still be necessary — if the project was reasonable and if the Government were satisfied that it was such a reasonable project — to give a State guarantee to the borrowing of the company. But there is no reason whatsoever why the company should not, out of its own resources, finance all this project. I await with interest the Minister's explanation as to why this uniquely very busy airport is unable to finance its own development.
If you look at the situation in Great Britain where all the British airport authorities are being privatised — I am not suggesting we should do the same in Ireland; that is not the thrust of my argument — it means somebody has decided that, taking the good with the bad, the busy with the slack, they can, in the future, finance all their own developments. Armed with that information, we are unwilling to impose an obligation on Aer Rianta to finance from their own resources the busiest airport, situated in the most populated area of the country. Leaving aside the fact that we do not know whether the investment is a good or bad thing, I do not see why public funds should be committed to it at all.
I would have quite a lot to say about the extension of the runway in Cork Airport and about the importance of Shannon, which has an immensely important part to play in Irish aviation. I would have much to say about the poor and bad decision to invest so much State money in Knock Airport if it were relevant to the motion. As it is not relevant to the motion I will not develop it. I ask the Minister not to lose sight of the fact that the Members of this House — whether they are supporters of the Government or members of the Opposition — are not possessors of a vast automatic insight into the mental processes of semi-State organisations. We cannot automatically say whether investments are a good idea.
If parliamentary democracy is to mean anything here it must mean that more information is given to more Members of Parliament who can express their view and their view can have a real part to play in the decision under discussion and in future decisions which are even more important. This kind of approach to public expenditure reminds me of a story told to me while I was a very young member of a local authority. An older and far wiser member of the authority spoke to me after a meeting one evening when we had approved a vast drainage scheme for the city of Cork, more or less on the nod. I expressed horror at this approach towards public expenditure. He said to me that, if the discussion was about buying an additional ten typewriters we would have discussed it for an hour, but we put through on the nod millions and millions of pounds of public money because, in some mysterious way, that is capital. Unfortunately, that is the way in which public affairs are run here. I am not satisfied that they should continue to be run in that way. There is a duty on this Minister and on all Ministers, in this Administration and in future Administrations, to be more forthcoming with the Legislature, to explain to them the rationale behind their decisions, to treat them as sensible human beings and sensible participators in the science of government.
If the Minister has made the right decision he has nothing to fear in presenting us with the facts, because we will start from a position where we will be prejudiced in favour of the Minister's decision in the first place. Inevitably we will be presented with the same facts and in the vast majority of cases, we will arrive at the same decision as arrived at by the Minister but it will be an informed decision, one that we can stand over and not based on a blind faith in the political and economic wisdom of Ministers of this Administration or any other Administration.
I look forward to the Minister's reply in this regard. Words fail me concerning why we should approve this order on the basis of the presentation before us today. I apologise to the Minister for the second time for appearing to have taken a position which is antagonistic to himself. I take it because he is the only person here today about whom I can make such comments. He is not the only person about whom I would like to make the comments, but he is the only person about whom I can make the comments because of the restrictions when commenting on other public servants, placed upon me by the rules of this House.
In concluding my remarks I look forward to the Minister's explanation as to why we in this House should approve a State guarantee in the sum of £25 million in respect of a project which will cost £31 million with 50 per cent of it borrowed. The borrowing is to be about £16 million but we are giving approval for a State guarantee of £25 million. That is an extraordinary way for a House of the Oireachtas to deal with taxpayers' funds.
