In recent days press reports suggested that the Government was about to agree that our national airline, Aer Lingus, would be put up for sale within a matter of months. Will the Taoiseach confirm if this is the case and if the sale of Aer Lingus has been under active discussion in Cabinet or is scheduled for such discussion? If the Government sells Aer Lingus, what form will the sale take and to whom will it be sold?

Is the Taoiseach happy that the national airline should go the same way as the national telecommunications industry, namely, into the hands of venture capitalists, speculators, a billionaire tax exile facilitated by the Government's legislation and the type of people who think that the cabin crew should hop out and push an aeroplane along the runway if it stalls to get it going again? All these people have milked the telecommunications industry of hundreds of millions of euro, resources which properly belong to the people and which could be invested in many of our starved public services rather than going into the coffers of bloated multinational corporations.

Aer Lingus made a profit of €83 million last year. Anybody who used the service in recent times and saw the pressure workers are under to keep the company going will know from where the extra profit came. Is the Taoiseach aware that many people would regard it as outright treachery if the Government were to decide, in exactly the same manner as it sold our telecommunications industry, to sell the national airline of an island nation to faceless venturers and allow them to speculate with the company and its workers without democratic control?

The short answer to the Deputy's long question is that there is no proposal before the Government to sell Aer Lingus. I do not have anything——

He should tell that to his Minister for Transport.

All the answers to the other questions, therefore, fall. Twice in the past ten years, taxpayers' resources had to be used to save Aer Lingus, because of many of the issues the Deputy mentioned. The company was not able to survive without injections of resources.

It was not the only airline in need of them.

The trade union representatives, the representatives of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions as well as SIPTU and IMPACT and the company worked hard to try to find a viability plan. The concern of the trade unions and workers now is whether, in the changed world of aviation, they can sustain all their achievements in the longer term without looking to the future and making plans. I know management and workers have that concern but there are no conclusions.

Will the Taoiseach be more specific on the Government's intention regarding the future of the national airline? It is not for nothing that he and his Minister for Transport orchestrated the passing of legislation facilitating the sale of a significant section of Aer Lingus to private venture capitalists. Does he remember how his Government burned 400,000 people, mostly small investors, when his former Minister for Public Enterprise engaged in every trick to con them into buying shares in Eircom? Admittedly the powers of recall of the former Minister in question, Senator O'Rourke, are much greater than the Taoiseach's, as we have seen in recent days. Surely, however, he cannot forget how ordinary people were burned while four executive directors of the company earned €29 million in a brief two and a half year period. For good measure, they threw a few million euro in the direction of a tame trade union leader who inexplicably maintains his position as general secretary of the main union. Is this the future the Government has mapped out for Aer Lingus? The Taoiseach should not tell the House that no decision has been made. What is his intention, as the Prime Minister, with regard to Aer Lingus in the remainder of his Government's period of office?

Whatever happens with Aer Lingus in the future, the Government will try to protect and maintain the jobs of all the ordinary people, as Deputy Joe Higgins describes them, who work in the company.

What about the people in Shannon Airport who have been told they must move to Dublin or lose their jobs?

As we know, aviation is extremely volatile. We have seen several airlines, including Olympic Airways, SAS and KLM, in trouble. At least we have an airline in which people may possibly invest to keep it expanding in future. Aer Lingus has gone through a period of overhaul but that matter is one for consideration in the future. As the Deputy knows, if the company gets into trouble again, the way is no longer open for taxpayers' money to be invested in it. That is not an alternative that is open to us.

It is open, that is a falsehood.

Aer Lingus has successfully turned itself around and the issue now is to try to maintain, sustain and develop it.