Management told union officials at a follow up meeting that the airline was losing €1m a day but that it has a plan to reduce major cost disparities between Aer Lingus’ own ground operations and the third party groundhandling companies operating at Irish airports.

Newly hired Aer Lingus ground staff are paid as much as 35pc more than competitors within six months of starting their employment, Aer Lingus’ director of HR and Dublin Airport operations, Sean Murphy, told officials.

“Essentially what we are looking to do is fix things that we believe are broken. So we have looked quite extensively at the other market players in ground operations across the world and we believe that our new-starter terms and conditions are significantly off-market and that needs to be addressed.”

The airline had carried out benchmarking against Sky Handling, Swissport and Menzies.

“An IAG plane can land in Dublin and get offloaded by another handler at a significantly less price than that we can offer to handle it ourselves,” he said.

In a very short period of time, Aer Lingus has gone from being the best performing operating company within the IAG group to now the worst performing, he said: “The harsh reality is that we cannot rule out large scale layoffs, redundancies and pay cuts,” he said.

Murphy said summer bookings had not yet materialised and that Ireland had been an outlier with “uniquely stringent” restrictions.

“We had a strong balance sheet coming into 2020 but there's no company that could have had a balance sheet strong enough to sustain what we have seen coming at us. When you have a situation where nobody wants to buy your product or use your product and you have the Guards at your front door to stop anyone using your product it is very, very difficult,” he said.

Union officials responded that “no one could say the low twenty thousands is an unreasonable wage”. Staff had taken pay reductions ranging between 40pc and 70pc since the pandemic began, while Aer Lingus made over €1bn for IAG in the previous four years, they said.

Shannon cabin crew ‘look to family to pay mortgage’

Aer Lingus has not ruled out operating flights at Shannon Airport if there is demand from passengers despite the plans it has announced to axe its cabin crew base at the airport.

But the news is cold comfort to staff at the airport who accused the airline of consistently targeting them with cutbacks.

“We are being cut because a lot of cabin crew in Shannon are more senior than those in Dublin,” said one of 82 Shannon-based cabin crew members who faces losing their job after more than 25 years flying with the airline.

“Aer Lingus is only concerned with its bottom line,” the crew member said, outlining to the Sunday Independent how their own family finances had already taken a bad hit from massive pay cuts over the past 15 months.

“I already have to go to family looking for money to pay my mortgage because I used up the mortgage moratorium already last year.”

Aer Lingus HR director Sean Murphy told a meeting of union officials that while the airline would continue to fly out of Shannon “if there is a market there” that flights from the airport would be staffed by Dublin-based crew.

There may be “a limited resource requirement” for Shannon this autumn while the runway at Cork is closed but the lay-off situation for ground staff at the airport would continue. The airline is undertaking an immediate review of ground operations requirements at both airports, he said.

Sunday Independent