David the Government had already paid the airport the redundancy money, without which the airport management had no provision. BOI took the funding from the account when they saw the writing on the wall, before they went into liquidation leaving the debts.

then how can BOI take the money which was for paying redundancies?

Well that’s the question, but many loan agreements have clause that the bank can take funds from current accounts if they believe the business won’t cover loans, very worrying precident for other companies but it’s apparently legal. So Gov not the bogey man in this case, if anyone is to blame for lack of redundancy provision it’s the airport management.

Hi David, of the 1.6m BOI took back 1.1m and left 500k in the airports account, of this 450k was to cover redundancy payments and the remaining 50k could keep them going for another week (it’s costing them 40-50k a week to run the airport). The airport management have since shifted the money (500k) into another bank account. I hope the airport do the right thing!

It takes 2 hours at the speed limit ;-)

The banks and money people are the ones with the power . The ”public” representatives are the puppets for these puppet masters.

Best wishes to the Galway Airport workers with their sit in for their entitlements. Enough is enough, stand firm.

I’m not so sure BOI were completely wrong. They were bailed out by us (3.5 b+ I think) so it’s important they’re making wise decisions with our money. Galway Airport has no commercial flights and no real source of income since Aer Arann’s PSO route was pulled and government funding for the airport was cut before Christmas. It’s costing 40-50k a week to run, so minus redundancy payments they had about 6 months to go before there was no money in the account (bar redundancy payments).

With loans outstanding it was better for them to offset that 1.1m against the loan book before the inevitable happened in 6 months and there was nothing to recoup. There’s little hope they could generate enough money in that time with no potential airlines to operate there.

I doubt BOI took the decision lightly, the owners of the airport are Galway Chamber of Commerce so BOI will no doubt be losing a lot of other customers!

The whole scenario is messed up, the government provided that 1.6m to Galway airport to cover redundancy payments etc, then BOI whose shareholders now include the government takes money off the airport but leaves enough for redundancy payments. If I was a suspicious person….