It is a great pleasure to be back here again. I have been asked to give a brief presentation of ten minutes with ten minutes for a question and answer session. Since we do not have the time to read through all the correspondence, I have brought two booklets for the committee which summarise the entire sequence of events that took place last year. The first booklet is the correspondence between Ryanair, the Tánaiste and the IDA re Ryanair's February 2009 offer to create 500 jobs in hangar 6. Rather than bore the committee to death with this correspondence — although it is relatively short — I draw the committee's attention to the first letter in that pack which is letter No. 1. The dates are important. This is a letter dated 26 February 2009, almost 12 months ago. This was at a time when SRT had announced it was closing and withdrawing from maintenance at Dublin Airport and planned to make either 900 or 1,100 engineers redundant. The Tánaiste had set up a task force with all the usual panoply of stuff to find jobs, create jobs, rescue jobs and so on. Being the opportunistic business we are, we thought here is an opportunity, we will write to the Tánaiste and we made the following offer. I refer the committee to paragraph three:
The lack of suitable facilities at Dublin together with an airport monopoly that has repeatedly refused to engage in constructive dialogue on alternative facilities has forced Ryanair to locate base maintenance facilities overseas [at places like Prestwick and Stansted.]
I refer the committee to the following page which contains the kernel of our offer:
However, in the light of this recent announcement by SR Technics, Ryanair (the worlds largest international low fare airline) ... is willing to immediately set in and commit its foreseeable future base maintenance requirements to Dublin and guarantee the survival of this industry and the creation of up to 500 well paid aircraft maintenance jobs in North Dublin.
This offer is conditional only upon our ability to operate free from the interference of the DAA monopoly and to facilitate this we are prepared to buy the freehold to the hangar 6 facilities back from the DAA for the same cost that they have paid to SR Technics and on the same terms and conditions that this facility has operated under since its inception. This will provide Ryanair with the necessary facility in which to carry out our maintenance and allow for the creation of 500 [ jobs.] ... Ryanair is the only viable airline alternative with the scale, growth and capacity which can genuinely justify and sustain the continued existence and expansion of this industry ... if this opportunity is missed we will be forced to continue to invest in non-Irish overseas facilities, a situation that will remove any opportunity for Ryanair to create this volume of new jobs at Dublin Airport.
I refer the committee to letter No. 3. Following a number of months of meetings with the IDA and with lots of talk but not a lot of action, the Tánaiste wrote back to me and I refer to the second paragraph:
I am highly supportive of this project and you can take it that all Government agencies are expected to assign the highest priority to job creation in current circumstances. I understand that the hangerage is available at Dublin Airport to accommodate the project but that a number of other parties are in discussion with DAA with a view to securing facilities and that the window of opportunity may not remain open much longer. [This letter is dated 12 August and the dates are important.]
I, and my Department and its agencies will do whatever we can to progress this project. However, I don't think further progress is possible without direct discussion between Ryanair and DAA, however it is arranged. I really don't see how parties can agree on a commercial arrangement, particularly given the complexity of the situation at the Airport, without talking to each other.
We wrote back to the Tánaiste in letter No. 4 to thank her for her letter and remind her that we did not want to talk to the DAA. We said we were happy to buy or to lease the hangar through an honest broker such as IDA Ireland. We reminded her of Ryanair's only condition: "We will not enter into direct discussions with the DAA". As we do not trust the DAA, we do not deal with it. We told the Tánaiste that if that was all she had got, the jobs would go abroad.
In the interests of brevity, I will take the committee forward to the last exchange of correspondence with which I am dealing. I refer to letter No. 13 which was sent to Ryanair by IDA Ireland on 10 September. It is stated in the second paragraph of that letter:
We have continued to work with the DAA to clarify the position as regards Hangar 6 and to explore if any other workable option might be available. As regards Hangar 6, I understand that while there are outstanding issues to be resolved with Aer Lingus, which will determine its availability, the DAA has re-affirmed its willingness to discuss this matter further and to consider any proposals from Ryanair.
As we were not making proposals to the DAA, we did not need IDA Ireland to come back and give us the same offer. We were prepared to create 500 jobs and use the hangar for all the maintenance activity it could take. The only condition was that we would not deal with the DAA. I wrote back to IDA Ireland to say:
Thank you for your letter of today's date. As far as Hangar 6 is concerned, we welcome the confirmation that the DAA has no "other interested party" willing to invest in this facility or create 500 well paid, sustainable jobs there ... We will not however enter into any discussions with the DAA monopoly ... any further discussions between the IDA and Ryanair in relation to our offer of investment in the Hangar 6 facility [and 500 new jobs] must be concluded [by the end of] September.
Mr. Barry O'Leary wrote back to me in letter No. 15. I wrote back to him on 24 September in letter No. 16, the last letter in the file I furnished to members:
I note your confirmation that "Hangar 6 continues to be occupied by Aer Lingus". This is untrue ... If as you claim, the IDA, the Tánaiste, and the Minister for Transport are "fully committed to maximising maintenance employment at the airport" then why is the only offer you have received from one of the world's largest airlines, to create up to 500 high paid maintenance jobs in Dublin Airport dismissed so casually? ... It beggars belief that this government could allow such an insignificant line maintenance requirement [that of Aer Lingus], which will not create one extra job, to prevent a multi-million dollar investment in the facility and in the creation of up to 500 jobs there ... Since Ryanair is already far advanced with much lower cost airports than Dublin, the terms for the construction of new maintenance facilities at European airports ... I am afraid we have no interest in looking at other green field sites [in Dublin] if our offer to acquire ... Hangar 6 ... is not acceptable.
That is where Ryanair's correspondence with the Tánaiste and IDA Ireland finished.
I have also given the committee a copy of a report in The Irish Times of 6 January last, in case some other parties use it to try to confuse the committee with the complexities and difficulties of the Aer Lingus lease of hangar 6. The newspaper reported the good news about the lease:
AER LINGUS is to rent the largest hangar at Dublin airport to centralise its aircraft maintenance operation. [By the way, all the heavy maintenance work has been contracted out to France for the next 10 years] The deal was concluded on Christmas Eve and was the most important industrial letting in Ireland in 2009.
I draw the committee's attention to the report that the Aer Lingus lease of hangar 6 was concluded on 24 December 2009, nine months after we had first written to the Tánaiste to offer to create 500 jobs in an empty hangar and four months after the last of our correspondence with the Tánaiste's office and IDA Ireland, in which we had offered to buy or rent the hangar through IDA Ireland and create 500 jobs. What did the DAA, Aer Lingus and the Department of Transport do? They reached a cosy deal on Christmas Eve, whereby the hangar was rented by the DAA to Aer Lingus.
It is stated in the second last line of the report in The Irish Times, “Aer Lingus currently employs 250 aircraft maintenance staff at Dublin airport but it has no immediate plans to increase that number, according to the company”. One can bet one’s bottom dollar that Aer Lingus has no immediate plans to increase that number — it is cutting jobs.
The hangar was leased on 24 December to an airline which had no heavy maintenance business for it — all such business has been contracted out to France for the next 10 years. Aer Lingus has not created a single job in the facility. It has not yet even moved into it because it has nothing to move in. We went to the hangar last week to take pictures which we published on our website. Unfortunately, the doors of the facility have been locked closed since. When RTE staff went there today, they could not get pictures of what was going on in the empty hangar.
The final document in the file, sadly, is Ryanair's announcement on 10 February of the creation of 200 jobs in Prestwick where we are investing €10 million in building a big hangar which will hold three aircraft side by side. That is the first of 200 jobs.
We have released this correspondence to expose the inaction of the Tánaiste and IDA Ireland. I do not have a suitable word to describe the activities of the DAA and Aer Lingus. They had an offer on the table at a time when all the State agencies were doing whatever they could to create jobs. They did nothing for a period of nine months, other than to create a vacuum in which the DAA agreed a friendly lease with Aer Lingus in respect of hangar 6. Members may have noticed that yesterday evening, after we were all summoned to this committee meeting, Aer Lingus announced that it intended to centralise some of its operations in hangar 6. Of the 450 jobs it plans to move into hangar 6, not one will be new because operations people and cabin crew are being moved out of Aer Lingus's headquarters building. I am not sure what cabin crew will be doing in a maintenance hangar — perhaps they will have céilí dances or something. Not one job will be created there. In the next two or three weeks, sadly, Ryanair will sign one of two offers it has received from two competing European governments — two competing European airports — for another hangar. We have yet to decide whether it will have three or four bays. We will create approximately 250 jobs somewhere other than Ireland.
I remind the committee that after the Tánaiste established a task force last February, the world's largest airline offered her 500 jobs. In such circumstances, why did the Minister with responsibility for jobs, IDA Ireland and the DAA do nothing to take up this offer? I do not suggest anybody has it in for me, but if I was Bill Gates, Michael Dell or a representative of the American pharmaceutical industry and I came in here to offer 500 jobs and the only condition was that I did not want to talk to the DAA, a way would be found to do business without talking to the DAA.
I draw the committee's attention — I am about to make my last point — to the second booklet I have provided. It sets out a sequence of claims and comments made by the Taoiseach and the Tánaiste in the Dáil last week. In the first three pages of the document I have listed a sequence of quotes which I have taken directly from the Official Report. I draw the committee's attention to quote No. 23, a remark made by the Taoiseach in the Dáil. Members can read some other marvellous quotes from the Tánaiste and the Taoiseach on the first three pages of the document. The Taoiseach said, "there was a competition." No, there was not. He continued, "Michael O'Leary and Ryanair for whatever reason, which is their own business, did not compete for the hangar." We did not know there was a competition, but we spent all last year writing to the Government to offer to buy or lease the hangar. The Taoiseach has also said Ryanair did not "seek ownership of the hangar". I have given the members of the committee details of the offers we made in writing to buy the hangar. He has also said we did not "seek a lease for it last September." In fact, the committee will find that we did last February, last March, last April, last June, last July and last September. The Taoiseach has claimed that we "suggested [we] needed the hangar to go ahead with a heavy line maintenance operation." We do not need the hangar. We were offering to create 500 jobs in this country if the Government would sell us or lease us an empty hangar.
