Galway Airport will be closed in "just days or weeks" unless Bank of Ireland is forced to hand back €1.1m it took from the fully compliant facility, a key figure has warned.
Declan Dooley, who is a director at the airport and also the Galway chamber president, said the international tourist hub would be unable to keep its doors open into next month unless drastic action is taken.
According to the senior official, Bank of Ireland’s decision to take the money from a deposit account to offset loans has left the airport with just €500,000.
However, as €450,000 of this is ring-fenced for redundancies, effectively the company has just €50,000 to keep the airport running.
Its monthly costs are on average €40,000 to €50,000.
"The clock is ticking on this," said Mr Dooley.
"Under company law, with only this amount of money we should be closing. We are taking legal advice on how to respond to Bank of Ireland, but there will have to be a decision to help us from someone early next week."
Mr Dooley added that Tánaiste and Labour leader Eamon Gilmore, whose constituency is in Galway, appeared "quite appalled" at the situation when he spoke with officials yesterday.
News of the mounting pressure came as two Government ministers launched an investigation into the bank’s decision to seize the funds provided by taxpayers to the airport.
Finance Minister Michael Noonan has demanded an explanation for the bank’s departure from normal practice, while Transport Minister Leo Varadkar has asked officials from his department to investigate.
Attorney General Máire Whelan is also understood to be studying the legal basis for the bank’s decision.
In an extraordinary move last Thursday week, the bank took €1.1m held on deposit by the airport, and offset it against its loans.
The money was part of a €2.1m payment by the Government to the facility in December to fund its redundancy programme and ongoing operations.
A total of €1.6m of that money was on deposit with the bank when the move was made.
There are fears the move by Galway Chamber of Commerce to transfer the remaining money into another bank will prompt many business owners to follow suit, after chamber chief executive Michael Coyle said the organisation had been approached by a number of city businesses worried that their banks might take similar action.
Mr Coyle said: "That is a major departure from standard practice and custom. The wider implications of what the bank has done have to be considered if banks are now going to act in this way."
That view was echoed by Michael Corliss, chairman of Galway Airport.
"If that is to be the new practice, it could have an impact for multinationals operating in Ireland," he said, adding that the move "scuttled" a plan that was being drawn-up to secure the future of the airport.
Joey Barton, Barack Obama and Stephen Fry are some of Twitter’s most prolific users with more than 17m followers and nearly 70,000 tweets between them.
Regularly accused of being less than eloquent on the football pitch, the QPR star has a penchant for Cantona-esque online diatribes. As he would most likely put it himself.
When he doesn’t have his finger on the button, the US president — or at least his aides — appear happy pressing other buttons to reach out to vital voters come November.
* Joan Rivers (@joan_rivers) (Comedian) (3,706 tweets, following 194, 810,451 followers)
Not for the faint-hearted, but then again, anyone who has heard even a handful of Ms Rivers’ jokes won’t need anyone to tell them that.
* Stephen Fry (@stephenfry) (Actor) (10,739 tweets, following 52,247, 3.84m followers)
One of the first people to champion the Twitter cause, Fry’s encyclopedic knowledge and ability to join online discussions remains a central part of the social network.
— Fiachra Ó Cionnaith (@ocionnaith)
a d v e r t i s e m e n t
This appeared in the printed version of the Irish Examiner Saturday, February 04, 2012
