The next item on the agenda is the matter of 300 jobs at Dublin Airport. I thank the delegations for coming to this meeting at short notice. I thank the delegations from Ryanair, Aer Lingus, Dublin Airport Authority and IDA Ireland. Invitations were also issued to the Minister for Transport and the Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment and they have indicated they will attend the committee on another day after the facts have been presented here today.

I will call each delegation in the following order: Ryanair will have ten minutes for a presentation and ten minutes for questions and the same will apply for Aer Lingus, DAA and IDA Ireland.

I welcome Mr. Michael O'Leary and Mr. Michael Hickey of Ryanair. Mr. O'Leary has ten minutes.

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.

Mr. O'Leary's time is up.

The Taoiseach continued, "However, they never negotiated and they never contacted the DAA about that hangar." That is right. We did not negotiate with the DAA about the hangar. It was the only condition that was attached to our offer to create 500 jobs. We will not talk to a dishonest organisation such as the DAA. To this day, we still do not understand why nothing was done to take up the 500 jobs which have now been lost to another European country.

Is the essence of the issue that Ryanair would not talk to the DAA? I have two questions. A letter sent by IDA Ireland on 21 July reads:

Following on from your letter on July 2 ... the DAA wants to engage actively and constructively with any company to create viable employment at Dublin Airport ... Michael, clearly the position outlined above does not tie in with your letter of July 2 but I do feel that the best way to progress matters is for direct contact with DAA and we are happy to arrange this if you feel that IDA chairing the meeting would be of benefit.

What was Ryanair's response to that letter from IDA Ireland? Second, where does Ryanair currently do its heavy maintenance work? What other European airlines carry out their own heavy maintenance work, rather than having it done by other companies or agencies?

Although I do not have it to hand, I am absolutely certain that our response to that letter would have been, "We are not talking to the DAA". The correspondence we have given the committee today shows the complete hollowness and dishonesty of the claim that the DAA is willing to engage constructively with anybody creating jobs.

Can Mr. O'Leary answer my question?

I am answering it. We spent nine months last year offering to create 500 jobs in hangar 6.

What was Ryanair's response to IDA Ireland's letter of 21 July?

I have already answered that question. Our answer was, "We will not deal with the DAA".

What was Ryanair's response to IDA Ireland?

Our response was, "We will not deal with the DAA".

Can Mr. O'Leary give the committee some evidence of that response? He has produced a great deal of evidence.

Our response to the letter read:

Dear Barry,

Thanks for your fax of July 21 which I received here this morning.

Given that Ryanair has offered to reimburse the DAA the full amount they recently paid to SRT for Hangar 6, there is nothing to impede the DAA, via the IDA, agreeing to these patently "commercial terms".

Since the "commercial arrangements for the use of Hangar 2" were only hammered out over a 24-hour period on the steps of the High Court, we have no faith or confidence in the DAA's claimed "willingness" to negotiate anything with Ryanair...

The DAA doesn't have any other potential client to fully occupy Hangar 6 or create ... 500 ... jobs...

The DAA's claims about "supporting job creation" or "meeting the needs of users" or "arriving at pragmatic, sensible commercial terms" are simply false.

If these claims were true then the DAA would have accepted our offer (via the IDA) of the same commercial terms for Hangar 6 as it recently paid to SRT.

This would have allowed Ryanair's offer to create 500 jobs to be accepted by the Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment and the IDA. It could not be clearer.

What about the other question?

The other question was on the number of other airlines that engage in heavy maintenance. I do not honestly know the answer. We do all our own heavy maintenance on our fleet. This includes the monthly, annual and biannual checks. At present, the facilities are in a five-bay hangar in Stanstead and a two-bay hangar in Prestwick. We are now building a three-bay hangar facility in Prestwick. In the next three or four weeks, another three-bay or four-bay hangar facility will be announced somewhere else. Those last two hangars would not be built in Prestwick and another location if the Government had accepted our offer last year to sell us or lease us hangar 6. We would now be employing the 500 currently unemployed aviation engineers in north County Dublin.

Is Ryanair doing all its own heavy maintenance?

Yes, up to the two-year checks.

What about checks in addition to those?

We do not have aircraft old enough to be subject to such checks. Generally our policy is to sell aircraft by the time they are seven years old.

The offer by the IDA to chair a meeting and commence negotiations should have at least merited acceptance by Ryanair. It should at least have sat down with the IDA and got on with the job rather than simply rejecting the offer, as it did in the letter.

We had been sitting down with the IDA for approximately four months of last year. However, there is no point in coming back. If we are making an offer to the Tánaiste to create 500 jobs and the only condition is that we will not deal with a dishonest organisation such as the DAA, there is not much point in either the IDA or the Tánaiste writing back to us stating we must deal with it.

Okay.

I welcome Mr. Michael O'Leary. We are in the middle of a very serious global aviation crisis. The number of tourists coming to Ireland is down by 900,000 this year.

It is 3.5 million.

We need Ryanair's 500 jobs. If they are on the table, the political system must respond. The barrier Ryanair has established involves its talking to the DAA but it is prepared to accept the IDA and goodwill from Ministers. Why are talks not happening?

Quotations by Mr. Michael O'Leary seem to indicate a very serious lack of action. Given the rate of unemployment nationally, affecting over 400,000 people, we should stand on our heads to create the jobs in Dublin Airport. Dublin Airport is big enough for Ryanair and Aer Lingus. The problem is that the present administration is not to the liking of Ryanair. The DAA is running the show, as matters stand. Its chief executive is paid approximately €700,000 per year. It does not make sense to me that, if the jobs can be created, we are not pushing the barriers out and that the Minister is not doing enough. What does Ryanair believe needs to be done, but which is not being done currently, to ensure the jobs can be created at Dublin Airport? We cannot afford to have the jobs leave the country. They are essential to our economy.

Sadly, the first 200 jobs have already left. They were announced in Prestwick last week.

I will allow Mr. Michael O'Leary to reply later. I call Deputy Broughan.

I welcome Ryanair's chief executive, Mr. Michael O'Leary, and his colleague. Many observers considering this issue say, "A plague on both your houses", the houses being those of the Government and Ryanair. They have been messing around and perhaps 300, 400 or 500 jobs have been lost.

Is Ryanair not behaving like a spoilt child waving its rattle, stating it will not do what is being asked of it, that it will not go into hangars 3 or 4 and that it must be hangar 6? Once again, it is throwing a big tantrum. Today, sadly, we saw SR Technics workers walking around the town again. I refer to the remainder of the 800 workers who lost their jobs this time last year.

I bear no brief whatsoever for the Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment, Deputy Mary Coughlan. I had to chase her time and again in the Dáil to produce some reasonable proposals.

Of the 30 expressions of interest, which reduced to two, I do not remember that of Ryanair. I was in touch with it and all the stakeholders at the time in question. Why did Ryanair not raise this row and go to war last September? I looked at the correspondence and acknowledge Ryanair states it was prepared to accept a lease on hangar 6 at the time in question. Why did it wait until February to go to war? Is it the case, as many believe, that Ryanair has already done a deal with Lufthansa Technik and a deal somewhere in eastern Europe? It is investing $140 million in Kaunas and developing its operation there substantially. Is it true that, having done the deal in Prestwick and while doing the deal in eastern Europe, Ryanair is coming to us to start moaning in retrospect? It is meaningless and very unfair to those workers who are on the street.

All of us have been in the hangars. Ryanair could easily do what it wants in hangars 3 or 4. It would have more space there than in Prestwick. I do not understand why Ryanair cannot start hiring the workers there tomorrow. I presume Ryanair will recognise the trade union the workers were marching with today.

Members should ask brief questions.

The Mullingar accord.

I welcome Mr. Michael O'Leary and Mr. Michael Hickey. How large is the Prestwick plant? When did Ryanair enter negotiations with the Scottish authorities and when will the plant be ready for use? Ryanair says it is in advanced negotiations on two alternative sites in Europe. What are the sizes of those plants, when were negotiations commenced and when will the hangars be ready?

Why is hangar 1, which is 8,400 sq. m, not suitable for Ryanair's needs? The hangar in Prestwick is 6,000 sq. m. Why is hangar 2, which is 5,300 sq. m, not suitable? Why is hangar 3, which is 8,400 sq. m, not suitable? Will Mr. Michael O'Leary confirm today that he has no interest? I understand the DAA and IDA are negotiating with a potential tenant who will create a quite substantial number of jobs for the hangar.

I have many more questions because I represent the area.

We have ten minutes.

I am a Deputy for the area and believe I should be allowed to continue given the seriousness of this discussion.

Okay.

Why is hangar 4 not suitable? Hangar 5 is 13,000 sq. m. Why does it not suit Ryanair's needs? Hangar 6 is 25,000 sq. m., four times the size of the Prestwick hangar. Why is Ryanair insisting on hangar 6 or nothing?

In the voluminous correspondence given to us by Mr. Michael O'Leary, one letter is omitted, namely, a letter dated 2 July that he wrote to Mr. Barry O'Leary, CEO of the IDA. Why is it not in the file given to us? Perhaps it was forgotten about? It states:

We would be prepared to agree to any lease term which gives the DAA the right to ask us to move from this Hangar 6 location to allow for necessary development of the airport, as long as in so doing, we are not disadvantaged. We believe this could be accommodated by some simple language which would require the DAA to provide us with a similar-sized hangar in a similar (ie: not less convenient) location on the same terms and conditions under which we occupy Hangar 6 should it require us to move in the future.

Given that the DAA expressed willingness to provide Ryanair with an alternative to hangar 6, why has it not accepted the offer in this regard by the IDA? Ryanair stated clearly it will not deal with the DAA. Why is hangar 6 so important in this context?

I ask the Deputy to conclude. It is not fair to other committee members.

I appreciate that but as Deputy for the area in question I have the right to ask questions. I will equally ask questions of the other bodies attending the committee.

When and why did Ryanair close off discussions with IDA Ireland? Will Mr. O'Leary confirm that hangar 6 can accommodate two Boeing 747s, aircraft Ryanair does not have. Why does the company need hangar 6 when it does not have wide-bodied aircraft?

Is there an integrated pollution prevention control licence needed for Ryanair aircraft?

I will have to hold the Deputy on that question. In all fairness, the Deputy is going into detail, time for which the committee does not have.

Does the Chairman want to hear the facts or not?

I shall give Mr. O'Leary an opportunity to respond and then I will be calling on Deputies Dooley and McEntee and Senators Ross and Ellis.

I have one final question.

I asked a question some time ago and I am also a Deputy for the area in question.

Yet the Deputy is not a member of the committee.

Well, there is no time pressure then, is there?

I ask Mr. O'Leary to respond to the three questions.

Michael O'Leary is more like a president.

First, 500 jobs cannot be saved; the first 200 have already gone. What needs to be done to save the 300 jobs is exactly the same as it was last week. All that needs to be done some time in the next week or so is to give us, sell to us or lease to us hangar 6.

The committee will hear much spin in the next hour that it cannot be done. It can be done. Two things need to happen. One, somebody in the Government needs to call Declan Collier in the Dublin Airport Authority and tell him to release hangar 6. That can be done because the DAA has a clause in the Aer Lingus lease which both the Taoiseach and the Tánaiste and Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment have confirmed. She claims it allows Aer Lingus to vacate the terminal in 12 months but he says 24 months. Since Aer Lingus has nothing there, it should take about 12 minutes to be out.

Alternatively, I will make this offer now in front of the committee. The Government owns 24% of Aer Lingus. I own 29% of it. I will happily give the Government a proxy over my 29% of Aer Lingus. The Tánaiste and Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment can then call an EGM and with her 54% voting power she can simply instruct Aer Lingus to get the hell out of hangar 6, although that will not take very long because it has nothing in it. This would free it up and not discommode Aer Lingus. We have no beef with Aer Lingus in this. What it did was commercial. Our beef is with the Government and the DAA.

Contrary to what the Taoiseach told the Dáil last week, there are two other hangars. Hangars 5 and 3 were both built by Aer Lingus for wide-bodied aircraft maintenance such as 747s. They can both hold the Aer Lingus Airbus A330. The claim that Aer Lingus's wide-bodied aircraft can only fit into hangar 6 is nonsense. The committee has photographs on this before it.

Hangar 5, as I understand it, cannot accommodate 747s.

It can.

I have been in the building.

I will ask the DAA to confirm that when it attends the committee.

Aer Lingus does not have 747s but A330s.

Yes, I accept that but I am referring to an old-fashioned jumbo jet.

Hangars 3 and 5 can both accommodate Aer Lingus aircraft.

Deputy Broughan asked if Ryanair will recognise unions in hangar 6. No. Hell will freeze over before we recognise a union in hangar 6 or anywhere else.

Mr. O'Leary did not say that to Aer Lingus.

Yes, we did,

No, you did not.

Yes, we did.

Was Ryanair prepared to recognise them when it took it over?

No, if you read the correspondence——

That is what Mr. O'Leary said.

We said Aer Lingus can continue to recognise unions but Ryanair will not.

What did you tell Aer Lingus?

What has Mr. O'Leary to say to the SRT workers?

I have a lot of questions to answer, can you let me answer them?

Mr. O'Leary will not answer the tricky ones though.

What do I say to the SRT workers? I say we offered their Minister for jobs the opportunity to get 500 of their jobs back last September but she has done nothing about it. Still, 300 of them could be in gainful engineering employment by September this year but only if the Minister for jobs in this country makes a call to the DAA or, otherwise, creates a vacancy in hangar 6.

Why did we wait until September to make the offer? As the correspondence demonstrates, we were making offers to the Tánaiste and Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment and IDA Ireland from February 2009.

Why did Ryanair not start this row in September?

We waited until we announced the first of these facilities elsewhere in Europe. If we had done so beforehand, it would be claimed Ryanair was whingeing, has no plans to create jobs and has some hidden agenda. We waited until the first 200 jobs went somewhere else to say these jobs were offered to the Tánaiste and Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment and the Government but they did nothing to secure them.

It is very strange that Mr. O'Leary, who gets so much public attention with 500 jobs on the table, did not plough on and demand the jobs were for Dublin and not for Prestwick or anywhere else.

Why did Mr. O'Leary stay so quiet last September?

For exactly the same reason I set out in the letter to the IDA and the Tánaiste and Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment. If they do not want these jobs, we are already in advanced discussions with other European airports and they will go elsewhere.

Why did Mr. O'Leary come back in February claiming he has had no correspondence since September?

I have a lot of questions to answer and I am still going through Deputy Broughan's questions.

Why did we wait until September? We were writing to them from February through to September of last year. The answer to that question is why did the DAA and the Department of Transport wait until Christmas Eve to lease hangar 6 to Aer Lingus who created not one job but will actually cut 900 jobs?

Are the deals already done? No. Call my bluff. Somebody in this Government can call my bluff in the next two weeks by telling me, "O'Leary you can have hangar 6; now create 300 jobs". It is very simple.

What if we give Mr. O'Leary a new hangar and call his bluff that way?

That offer was never on the table.

It was. Barry O'Leary, IDA Ireland, has said he would.

Deputy Kennedy has missed the point. I am the one creating the jobs. Here are the terms on which I want to create the jobs. Last February, my position was sell me or rent me hangar 6. It was vacant from February to December last year. If they want the last 300 jobs, they have to empty hangar 6.

Is Mr. O'Leary admitting he has alternative plans for hangar 6 if he will not take a spanking brand new similar sized hangar?

Yes, I have alternatives. They are elsewhere in two different European countries.

Mr. O'Leary wants 25,000 sq. m.

Mr. O'Leary without interruption.

Ryanair is currently leasing hangar 1. We never dealt directly with the DAA on this. Our lawyers dealt with the DAA's lawyers on the steps of the High Court for three weeks last year when the DAA was trying to push us out of the executive jet terminal, the old tiny hangar. We exercised the same clause we say the DAA can exercise with Aer Lingus, as confirmed by the Taoiseach and the Tánaiste and Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment. Only one aircraft can be fitted into hangar 1 because it is too small. It is the same for hangar 2. Hangar 3, which can fit an A330, will only allow two 737s side by side because it is too small. Only one aircraft can be fitted into hangar 4 because it is too small. Only two, possibly three, aircraft can be fitted into hangar 5 because it is too small.

It is also leased to Dublin Aerospace. It is interesting the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment has invested €6 million in that company, which I wish well, to create 30 jobs this year. On a like-for-like basis, the Department should be giving me €60 million to create 500 jobs in Dublin.

Why hangar 6 then? We can put four or five 737s side by side which is what is needed for an efficient maintenance operation. The planes are parked for a week or a month during the winter. All the bits are taken off, laid out on the floor and the engineers move from side to side.

The square footage argument is somewhat misleading. There are offices on the front of hangar 6. The DAA will give all this nonsense of 26,000 sq. ft. of offices. The actual hangar space is about four or five aircraft wide. Our new hangar in Prestwick will be three aircraft wide because we did not build a whole tonne of offices on the front of it.

What drives our requirement for hangar 6 is that it is the only hangar facility in Dublin in which we can put five 737s side by side. The alternative is the first three have gone to Prestwick and the second three will go to another European country in the next couple of weeks.

If Mr. O'Leary does not want 6,000 sq. m. of offices in hangar 6, why does he not take the IDA Ireland offer to build a second hangar in the same campus and create the jobs?

We never made that offer to the Tánaiste and Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment or IDA Ireland.

I am making the offer now. The Tánaiste and the Government will make it. Will Mr. O'Leary accept a new building on the same campus?

Ultimately, the new building will be on DAA land and we will have to deal with it. We will not deal with the DAA.

Hangar 6 is on DAA land.

I understand that, but that is why we wanted to buy it directly or lease it directly form the IDA. We are too far advanced. I am in advance negotiations with two other governments, whether German, Italian, Spanish, French just to cover my options.

Mr. O'Leary should get out the atlas.

I am much bigger in those European countries, by the way, than I am in Ireland. I will sign one of those two deals in the next two weeks. There is no offer on the table to the Irish Government as regards giving me a site now, not that it was too keen to give me one last February or March when I was writing to it.

We entered negotiations with the other European airports and governments at the same time——

Ryanair was in Prestwick as well.

Yes, that is correct.

When did it start negotiating with Prestwick?

At the start of last year, in February, March and April when we were offering the Tánaiste 500 jobs here in Dublin. It was exactly the same time.

That was in February 2009.

Yes. The hangar will be ready in Prestwick in September 2010. I was asked previously when we could start putting business into hangar 6 and we said September 2009. Recruitment of some of the SR Technics engineers could start in September this year because we can switch some of our maintenance around. We started negotiations with those other governments as regards the European hangar, in February-March last year, exactly the same time as these offers were being made to the Tánaiste and Dublin Airport. I have gone through all the hangars and said why they do not work.

We closed the discussion with the IDA in my last letter, there, dated 18 September, in which we concluded: "It beggars belief that this Government could allow such an insignificant Aer Lingus line maintenance operation, which will not create one extra job to prevent a multi-million dollar 500-job investment by Ryanair...".

Why did Mr. O'Leary not include the letter he wrote to the IDA on 2 July in the package he handed out today?

Because we have a package of letters with the IDA which would have taken——

It is relevant because Ryanair had accepted the principle that the DAA and IDA could move it out of hangar 6, and it would take an alternative premises of the same size in the same location.

Yes, that is correct.

That is what it said on 2 July 2009. Why does Mr. O'Leary refuse to countenance that now.

What we offered and accepted was that if it sold or leased us hangar 6, at some point in the future if the DAA required it for terminal 3, say, or the new northern runway and needed to move us, we can be moved, in exactly the same way.

Ryanair then takes the authority to the High Court in London, does it not?

Where we won, but we still had to get out.

Exactly, so it is a Ryanair terminal.

No. Let me read to the committee what we gave to the IDA at the time, which is: "We would be prepared to agree to any lease term which gives the DAA the right to ask us to move from this hangar 6 location to allow for necessary development of the airport, as long as in so doing we are not disadvantaged."

Why did Ryanair then change its position between July and September, when it point blank said, "hangar 6 or nothing"?

It has always been——

In the letter of 2 July it acknowledged that it would take an alternative premises.

I am quoting from the letter, dated 2 July: "We will be prepared to agree to any lease term which gives the DAA the right to ask us to move from this hangar 6 location."

——and to move to a new building in the same location, which is the offer the IDA is making to Ryanair today.

Yes, but only if it sells or leases us hangar 6. Nothing happens here without hangar 6.

This is my last question. In September the negotiations with the IDA concluded where Mr. O'Leary said, "hangar 6 or nothing". Ryanair then moved to Prestwick and concluded its deal there. Why, four months later, is he saying to the Government, "Give us hangar 6 again and we will create 300 jobs"? Why is he trying to renegotiate on something he knows was not going to happen because Aer Lingus de facto holds the head lease on it?

The Deputy has missed the point. We have not come trying to renegotiate anything. We have just released the correspondence with the Tánaiste and the IDA last year to expose the fact that we offered them 500 jobs and they did nothing.

Mr. O'Leary is saying Ryanair has no offer of a job right now.

Yes, I was asked on RTE on Monday whether the last 300 jobs could still be won by Ireland. I said they could. I was asked what I needed and said "hangar 6".

Ryanair is leading the SR Technics workers up the garden path by suggesting that there are 300 jobs for them when Mr. O'Leary has already made the decision to go Germany.

I keep telling the Deputy. Call my bluff, get me hangar 6 and Dublin can have the 300 jobs. It is very simple.

I do not want to delay too long, but what I am listening to is worse than Northern Ireland. We have a group of people here who are pretending to be Irish, and the reason this is getting so much media attention is because of the jobs at stake. The first question I have for Mr. O'Leary is whether everything was put out to tender properly from day one.

Is the Deputy asking whether there was a competition?

Yes, that is my first question. I am from County Meath and there are SR Technics workers domiciled there. I spoke for 40 minutes with the wife of a worker who is in Turkey with many other former SR Technics employees who have not been paid for four weeks. Their passports are taken from them every morning they go to work. As we are all Irish here, would Mr. O'Leary agree to an independent mediator sorting this out in the interests of the families of these people, because I believe we are getting nowhere. There is great press coverage, but if everyone is serious about jobs, as Mr. O'Leary has just indicated, there are 300 jobs still available. Irish workers are employed in the worst circumstances——

The Deputy is repeating himself.

I welcome Mr. O'Leary and thank him for his presentation. If he is serious about jobs, there is an alternative option for him. We should be delighted if he would base his maintenance facilities at Shannon. We have adequate lands available and we can certainly assist him. Perhaps he could comment on that.

He has indicated that the Government should boot Aer Lingus out of hangar 6. Ryanair owns almost 30% of Aer Lingus, so why does it not boot the company out? He has been talking about his relationship with the workers. They have an ESOT and it is possible that he could come together with them to force Aer Lingus, through that collective share power to make hangar 6 available, if he is serious.

Mr. O'Leary has also indicated that he would be prepared to move workers into hangar 6 within the next two to three weeks if it became available.

We did not issue any press release today.

This press release says that "jobs would be made available to Ireland "if hangar 6 was made available to the airport within the next two weeks".

That is correct, if somebody tells us that we can have hangar 6 within the next two weeks.

Where will those workers be taken from?

I call Senator Ross.

I want to go on to the next point. Who will lose out as a result of that? What other country will benefit? What kind of deal will Ryanair break out of here to move the jobs there?

We have seen this happening before in terms of moving flights around between airports. Mr. O'Leary can therefore understand the scepticism as regards where jobs might be moved around.

Not from Shannon, surely.

We have been on the receiving end of Ryanair wrath before.

I do not understand the problem. The solution has been suggested by many people here today, and by Mr. O'Leary, and I should like to ask him a question about this. He owns 29% of Aer Lingus and Deputy Mary Coughlan has 29.4%. Did she ask Aer Lingus to leave, because in the event, there is no doubt that between them, Mr. O'Leary and the Minister can call an EGM and fire the board if it does not act according to their instructions? Would Mr. O'Leary be prepared to get together with the Minister and go down that route? This is about jobs and the idea of Aer Lingus sitting there and obstructing job creation is quite unacceptable if the State and Ryanair want it. Between them they have a majority and it could be sorted out within weeks at this rate. Is that a solution that is acceptable to Mr. O'Leary?

I accept what Mr. O'Leary says about the DAA impeding jobs, and about his not talking to the airport authority. His record with the DAA and its record in obstructing him as regards various matters is enormous. Could he give the committee an estimate over his period of time at Ryanair of the number of jobs that the DAA has lost to Ireland and to the airport area?

Can Mr. O'Leary tell us why he will not deal with the DAA under any circumstances? That is the kernel to the whole problem, the row between him and the DAA. If that was not the case, we would not be here today because this would have been resolved. It is something we need to look at.

I agree with Deputy Broughan. I cannot understand how Mr. O'Leary became Rip Van Winkle and went to sleep from September until January. He did not seem to bother pushing this. In that time, was he using Dublin Airport as a bargaining chip in his discussions with the Prestwick and Scottish authorities? I am told that was the case. If Mr. O'Leary did get hangar 6, how much would he seek per job from the State on top of that? Can he guarantee the jobs will be paid at the same rate as paid by SR Technics or will he negotiate new rates with the workers?

I will allow Deputy James Reilly to put his questions because he is a local representative, but unfortunately we will have to cease questions then.

I will not repeat what everybody else said. I expect Aer Lingus will drive as hard a bargain as it can if it is to be got out of hangar 6. I accept Aer Lingus can be moved by the DAA under the terms of its lease, as has been admitted. People here should not be interested in the reason Mr. O'Leary has chosen now to put his case. We must accept it is his prerogative as to where he puts the jobs and the conditions under which he is prepared to operate. However, I have a few questions. Can Mr. O'Leary confirm that if the DAA hands over the hangar to the IDA, he is prepared to lease the hangar with a covenant that the hangar will only be used for aircraft maintenance and the necessary office space? Also, if it is the case that this can be done only under the condition that further jobs will be created by Mr. O'Leary, is he prepared to enter such a negotiation with people other than the DAA?

Many questions have been asked here, but the bottom line for me is that I do not expect Michael O'Leary to create jobs. I expect the Government to create them, through the Tánaiste and Taoiseach. Mr. O'Leary will go wherever he wants to go; that is his prerogative. We need to act.

I will allow Deputies Frank Feighan and Michael Lowry put a quick question and I will allow Deputy Leo Varadkar contribute because he is a spokesman on enterprise.

We may not like Michael O'Leary, but what he has done ——

We love Michael O'Leary.

Maybe the Opposition does not like him, but the Government certainly likes him.

Some of us do like him. Allow Deputy Feighan to contribute, without interruption.

Michael O'Leary has delivered for the country and he has what we want. Regardless of whether we like it, we are in a recession. Is it not better for us to give Michael O'Leary funding to create employment than to pay people to be on the dole? We need flexibility, but the Government has not been flexible. Jobs are the beginning and end of the way out of the recession. We need to appoint somebody immediately to acquire hangar 6 so we can ensure we get these jobs.

Like most people in this country, I admire Ryanair for the remarkable job it has done at home and internationally. I have just one question. When I was Minister for Transport — a long time ago — I and officials in my Department succeeded in achieving the takeover of Team Aer Lingus by SR Technics. The problem then — this is the reason SR Technics is under discussion today — is that work practices, procedures, the cost base ——

The Deputy's facts are incorrect. The company in question was FLS, which is a totally different company from SR Technics.

Yes, FLS. The work practices, procedures, the cost base and the failure to be competitive lost us that company. The same factors have put us in the position we are in today where the SR Technics jobs have moved abroad. How does Mr. O'Leary envisage he can make a success of re-employing that workforce under the same terms and conditions of employment, when its work practices, procedures, cost base and lack of competitiveness are the factors that contributed to its failure in the past?

If it was up to me, I would call Mr. O'Leary's bluff and offer him hangar 6. If he did not deliver, I would pursue him for the rest of his life. I have two brief questions. To the best of my knowledge, Aer Lingus and the DAA have not published the terms of the lease for hangar 6. Does Mr. O'Leary think they should and what is the reason they have not done so? With regard to whether Mr. O'Leary wants a terminal or a hangar, I have no objection to him having a terminal at Dublin Airport. That would be a good idea and would be good for customers. If Mr. O'Leary cannot produce the jobs or if the Government fails to take him up on the offer to produce jobs in aircraft maintenance, why will he not put in a bid to provide a terminal?

I have one more question. How many of the 300 employees Ryanair will take on will be direct Ryanair employees? Normal practice in Ryanair is to sub-contract some of the work.

I will try to deal with all of the questions as quickly as I can, but perhaps not in the order in which they were put. On the question of whether there was a competition for the hangar, there was no competition. The Taoiseach claimed there was, but there was no competition whatsoever. No other airline was invited to compete. We still do not know the terms of the competition. We suspect that one had to collect ten crisp packets and complete the slogan beginning with "I love the DAA and the Department of Transport because ... " in ten words. Even if there was a competition about which we knew nothing, will somebody explain to me how an airline — which originally sold off 1,100 engineers to FLS and then SR Technics where they were made redundant — won a competition for the hangar when it does not do heavy maintenance in it and has not created any job in it? Last night it was issuing a press release suggesting it would move cabin crew into the hangar, for céilí dancing and God knows what else as I have said.

On the question of whether I would agree to an independent review, the committee can have all the correspondence.

Not a review, but an independent chairperson who would get all the parties to sit down in one room to sort out the issue.

George Mitchell.

I do not care who it is.

As a proud Westmeath man who got shoved into the Meath West constituency for the most recent election, it is too late for an independent review. We are very close to signing up with another European ——

Mr. O'Leary said there are 300 jobs. If that is the case, there is time.

We are about to sign a deal with two other governments. The Irish Government has approximately two weeks to sort it out. If the Tánaiste wants these jobs, she must get hangar 6 for us within the next two weeks. If not, I understand. I am not trying to query Aer Lingus's pitch. I have no beef with Aer Lingus in all of this. It is perfectly correct to take whatever commercial decisions it wants. I have no issue with Aer Lingus. I have an issue — that is the reason we published the correspondence with the Tánaiste, the Government, the IDA, who sat on their hands and did nothing last year when we were offering 500 jobs——

Will Mr. O'Leary not agree to an independent person coming in on this?

There is not the time for that.

There is always time. Never say there is not the time. One cannot put the gun to anyone's head.

The Deputy is missing the point. I am not trying to put a gun to somebody's head.

I am not missing the point. That is what Mr. O'Leary is doing.

We are at the 11th hour in negotiations with two other European governments. I do not have time now ——

There was time to negotiate in the First and Second World Wars and for negotiation in Northern Ireland.

Surely Mr. O'Leary has until September, because the facility would not be built until then.

Exactly. Mr. O'Leary is not being fair. He should agree to an independent person being brought in. He already said he could stay here all night.

Guys and girls, in the real world of business we do not fart around for two weeks having independent reviews. I have been ——

It is not a review.

I have been negotiating with other European governments since February of last year. We are almost there on selecting the second destination and I am not about to embarrass Ryanair with another European government. I cannot ask it to wait while the Irish Government has an independent review. One does not have the time for that. I am pushing on with the business. We run the business——

When will the alternative location hangar be ready for Ryanair?

The builders will probably move in by the end of May.

May I put a suggestion to Mr. O'Leary?

Yes.

One of the points made to us is that there is a legally binding lease with Aer Lingus. Therefore, whether I or Mr. O'Leary likes it, that is the situation. Suppose, as a compromise, Aer Lingus, the DAA, the IDA and the Tánaiste were to say they would give Ryanair hangar 6 until such time as they built a similar hangar beside it into which Ryanair could move, would Mr. O'Leary be satisfied with that?

No, because one could not build it beside hangar 6 because the land is not available for it. I would not trust any offer I got from the DAA.

Suppose it is possible and suppose the Tánaiste is prepared to bend over backwards and say Ryanair will not have to deal with the DAA?

Why not amalgamate hangars 3, 4 and 5?

If we got Aer Lingus to let Ryanair into this hangar next week on the basis that a new similar sized hangar will be built somewhere nearby, would you accept that?

No.

Then with all due respects, you are like the baby with the rattler——

Would Ryanair share hangar 6? Our understanding is that the Aer Lingus lease, which is close to being a lien, means that if the company collaborated with Ryanair, they could both share the facility. Would Mr. O’Leary work together with Aer Lingus?

No.

Why not?

We take a typically Irish insular view of this. Here is O'Leary with 300 jobs and a hidden agenda, so will he do this, that and the other. We are a multinational company. We have been negotiating these jobs and these facilities with three other European governments at airports for the last 12 months, while the Irish Government sat on its hands. The only way the Government can get these jobs back — it needs to be done in the next two weeks — is to free hangar 6.

With all due respects, you are asking for the impossible Mr. O'Leary. I think you are being unreasonable in not being prepared to accept a number of compromises that have been put to you here today.

I wasted six months of my life last year writing to this Government, offering 500 jobs if it would sell or rent me an empty hangar, and now you tell me 12 months later that I am being unreasonable. I do not have time to wait while the Government dithers. We have to push on with our business and continue to grow.

Why does Mr. O'Leary not admit that he wants to set up a terminal there? He would have separate road access, private car parking, 6,000 square metres of office space and enough space for a terminal. Why does he not put his cards on the table and tell us his plan?

I refer the Deputy to my fourth letter to the Tánaiste, dated 13 August:

As you will be aware, Ryanair has offered arm's length commercial terms to lease this facility by reimbursing the DAA what they recently paid, while allowing the DAA to retain ownership and secure watertight guarantees that it will only be used as a maintenance facility, thereby protecting and addressing——

What if Mr. O'Leary changes his mind?

It will be written into the contract.

Mr. O'Leary would drive a coach and four through contracts.

This is a contract, not a political promise.

He did a deal with Shannon Airport as well and then he drove a coach and four through that. We know his style.

Does Deputy Dooley want me to answer the other questions? Or does he just want to——

He should just answer that question.

Allow Mr. O'Leary speak, without interruption.

Shannon was never on offer. The 900 unemployed aviation engineers are not in Shannon, but in north County Dublin.

Mr. O'Leary said that he would transfer some of them up to Scotland, but Shannon is much closer.

There is a fund of trained engineers in Prestwick. We have them there already and we are training them.

They can be flown down.

I was asked if the Tánaiste asked Aer Lingus to leave. I do not think so, but that question should be put to Aer Lingus officials. It would be unfair to ask Aer Lingus to leave, but does the Tánaiste want 300 jobs and is she prepared to do what is necessary to get them? There was no competition in spite of what the Taoiseach said. If there was a competition, how did an organisation like Aer Lingus, which originally got rid of these 1,100 workers, win the contract for the hangar when it has not created any job, has no heavy maintenance and has no use for the hangar facility?

I was asked to estimate how many jobs in Ireland were lost by the DAA. That is impossible to do, but in the last 12 months the DAA's high charges have meant that Dublin Airport has lost over 3 million passengers. There is a direct loss of approximately 1,000 jobs per million passengers, so the DAA managed to lose about 3,000 jobs at the airport in the last 12 months. It will lose about another 3 million passengers this year as it increases charges by 40% in the middle of a recession, when inflation is——

Where did those passengers go? How did they get out of the country if they did not use Dublin Airport?

They did not come in.

They did not come in.

The bosco on this, as my hairy friend beside me said, is very simple.

Hirsute would be a better word.

Does Mr. O'Leary mean that 3 million extra tourists would have come into this country over the past 12 months?

Yes.

He knows that is not factual.

Yes it is. Senator Ellis asked why I will not deal with the DAA. The committee will not be sitting around long enough, but my view, as stated publicly, is that the DAA is a dishonest and corrupt semi-State monopoly that has been trying to disadvantage Ryanair for many years.

We cannot accept that kind of language.

I do not have parliamentary privilege, so if people from the DAA want to sue me, I would happy to see them in court. I was asked if I was Rip Van Winkle, doing nothing since September. I was actively negotiating with the Scottish First Minister, the Scottish Transport Minister, the Scottish Enterprise Agency and Prestwick Airport. Instead of sending me letters full of waffle telling me I had to deal with an organisation with which I do not wish to deal, they asked me what I needed, how could they get me in here, how to clear the roadblocks, and they are also giving me £2 million in grants.

I was asked that if I get hangar 6, how much more would I look for from the State in subsidies. I will not look for one cent. In all my correspondence with the Tánaiste and with the IDA last year, I only asked for one little hangar. I did not ask for a penny. We do not want any subsidies, because we would not take a subsidy from this Government. We do not want employment or job creation subsidies, nor do we want training grants. We just want one empty hangar, yet the Government could not even manage that.

If we get hangar 6, we will receive nothing from the State. I will not pay the SRT rates to the engineers. I will pay the Ryanair rates to the engineers, which is the same rate we pay in Glasgow at the moment. There is not that much of a variance, because the pay for engineers is largely set around the pay for licensed engineers. The difference in working for Ryanair is that we will have the engineers working all the time, whereas in SRT they were largely sitting around drinking tea because their contracts were built into some 30 year old Aer Lingus lack of productivity agreement.

Deputy Reilly asked me would I undertake to use the hangar only for maintenance if the DAA sold it to us or leased it through the IDA. The DAA will burn that hangar to the ground before it sells or leases it to Ryanair, but the answer is "Yes". We would even allow the DAA to draft the clause which states it will only be used for maintenance. I am not trying to employ 300 engineers so that I can convert it into a hangar. The DAA will soon have a shiny new empty hangar. Dublin Airport will be awash with terminals. The DAA will soon be bankrupt because traffic is declining and it cannot pay its fees. I expect to get one of the DAA's two terminals in the next couple of years when it goes bankrupt, which I hope will happen soon.

How many more jobs will be created? Ryanair will directly employ about 150 of the 300 engineers, and about 150 will be hired through a contract employment agency. I will do that so that I do not have the bearded brethren from the unions — the hirsute brethren, with respect to Deputy Reilly — marching to my door and telling me they are going on strike if they do not get their lack of productivity. If they want to go on strike, the contractors will keep working and that is the way we run the business, which is to employ 50% of our workers directly, and 50% indirectly.

We do not want any funding to create jobs. We do not want any subsidies, training grants or even a penny from the Government. We only want one little hangar. We know it is now leased to Aer Lingus, but that lease dates from Christmas Eve 2009, between seven and 11 months after we offered the Tánaiste 500 jobs if she would only sell or rent us an empty hangar.

Deputy Lowry asked about the sale of TEAM Aer Lingus to FLS. Aer Lingus wanted to get TEAM Aer Lingus off its hands because it was bleeding money, it could not tackle the unions and there were many shoddy work practices going on out there. The purpose of TEAM Aer Lingus was to get the engineers and their pensions out of Aer Lingus and into a separate company, then flip it on to FLS and then to SRT, in order to be at two removes from Aer Lingus and its pension fund. Aer Lingus did not have any retained rights over TEAM Aer Lingus. In fact, Aer Lingus could not wait to get rid of it because it did not want the pension liabilities, the engineers or any of the stuff that was going on out there.

I was also asked if Aer Lingus had some superior interest which justified the DAA's decision to grant it a 20 year lease. Aer Lingus had no interest in hangar 6. As far as Aer Lingus was concerned, hangar 6, TEAM Aer Lingus and the 1,100 staff were about as welcome as nuclear waste material. It is only when the 1,100 were eventually made redundant, Aer Lingus came back in and is now renting the hangar from its friends in the DAA.

Do I believe the lease should be published? Absolutely, it should be published. We should see what Aer Lingus is paying for it, which I suspect is very little, although the DAA in December said it was €2.5 million a year. How could an airline that is losing €100 million a year, that is making 900 people redundant and that is awash with office space at Dublin Airport suddenly rent a big hangar when it has no maintenance business, and pay rent of €2.5 million a year and rates of €1 million a year?

Aer Lingus still employs more people in Ireland than Ryanair does.

How much would Mr. O'Leary pay for it, as a matter of interest?

The DAA paid SRT approximately €20 million-odd for the six hangars. On a like for like basis——

How much would Mr. O'Leary pay now to lease it?

That would be exactly what the DAA paid SRT for it, whatever that arm's length price was — we estimate it was about €15 million or so. That is exactly what we offered last February.

If the position was reversed and Mr. O'Leary held the lease on hangar 6, would he give it over to Aer Lingus in similar circumstances?

In the national interest, in the interest of creating 300 jobs and in the interest of seeing 300 former Aer Lingus engineers re-employed productively at Dublin Airport, I would tell the cabin crew to get out of hangar 6, I would move up to hangar 3 or hangar 5 and I would stand back and allow Ryanair, Ireland's greatest airline, to create 300 jobs here in Dublin.

If the British Government asked Mr. O'Leary to give up Stanstead, would he hand it over to the BAA?

Would Mr. O'Leary not agree with Donald Trump who, in his "The Apprentice" programme recently, sacked——

I do not watch rubbish like that.

He sacked a man because that man gave an advantage to a competitor. Is it not a golden rule of entrepreneurship to never give an advantage to a competitor? Why is Mr. O'Leary blaming Aer Lingus and suggesting it would be stupid enough to give Ryanair that cutting edge advantage? Why should it?

I thought I had explained that. I have no beef with Aer Lingus. The correspondence shows that the Tánaiste, the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment and the IDA did nothing——

It wants hangar 6 as well. That is the point.

It is welcome. However, why did the Tánaiste, the DAA and the IDA lease hangar 6 to Aer Lingus with not one new job being created when it had an offer from Ryanair to create 300 jobs?

There are 220 jobs. Does it not still have twice as many jobs as Ryanair at the airport?

It does not.

I wish to bring the discussion to a close.

Ryanair has been in discussion with Boeing and the US Government. What would the US Government do in this situation that is different to what the Irish Government is doing?

If the Deputy came offering 500 jobs to the US Government, it would build him the airport, it would certainly sack the DAA, although I do not believe the DAA would ever exist in the US anyway, and it would leave no stone unturned, as other European Governments have left no stone unturned, to give us what we want to create these jobs. This is the only Government which would not give us what we wanted.

The Deputy can criticise me for being childish, and I am guilty as charged. I am just a spoilt child — that is true — but I am a spoilt child offering 500 jobs. At a time when there are 450,000 people unemployed, one has to ask why in the name of God did the Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment and the IDA not bite my hand off, spoilt child that I am, to get these 500 jobs. Why were 300 unemployed aviation engineers marching in the rain today in the Garden of Remembrance? The Tánaiste is clearly concerned only about saving one job — her own — and could not care less about the 300 engineering jobs in Dublin that we are still offering, even at this late stage.

Mr. O'Leary has not been in discussions with the DAA since 2007. Does he not think he has been seriously disadvantaged and that Aer Lingus has wiped his feet by being in direct negotiations and getting hangar 6?

Since we stopped dealing with the DAA in 2006, we have grown from 30 million passengers to 75 million passengers. Profits have increased from €100 million to €450 million a year.

I am not questioning that.

We will this year become the No. 1 airline in Italy and in Spain, where we will overtake Iberia. Ireland is a very small market.

I accept that and I congratulate Mr. O'Leary. I am just making the point that if he had communication with the DAA, he would have had ongoing discussions and would not have lost hangar 6.

It is not the loss of hangar 6——

If Mr. O'Leary does not talk to people, how can he ever get to a negotiating table?

I have other people to negotiate with, who will build me hangars.

We all talk to our landlords; we have no choice. One has to talk to the landlord.

The Deputy may have to, but it is not my only landlord.

Ryanair and Aer Lingus are not the losers. The losers are 300 families in this country and the Irish economy.

I will bring the discussion to a conclusion. I thank Mr. O'Leary for attending and for his presentation.

I thank the Chairman and members.

I believe Mr. O'Leary's failure to respond to the IDA's urging and his continued failure today to give any acknowledgement to the DAA, which after all is Ryanair's landlord, is a failure on his part. I put it to him that while he has talked much about saving 300 jobs, he has been given some suggestions today by several members and he has rejected them out of hand. I must honestly conclude that he is not really serious about this.

Call my bluff.

If he were, there would be some——

Call my bluff.

I disagree with the Chairman's analysis. If we are being offered 300 jobs, we should take them. It is as simple as that.

I have sat and listened to Deputy Kennedy long enough and I have listened to the Chairman. I would use the word "refusal" rather than "failure". If there is any failure here, it is a failure of the Government in its responsibility to create jobs. Mr. Michael O'Leary's company or any other company has a right to put down its conditions and terms. Our responsibility is to create jobs.

There are alternatives which would create jobs.

They are not on offer.

There is the offer of a brand new hangar.

They are not on offer.

They are on offer.

We will soon hear the other side of the story from Aer Lingus and the DAA.

I thank the Chairman and Deputies.