Minister for Transport Noel Dempsey is adamant that he only learned on Thursday that the airline BMI had decided not to provide a service between Shannon and Heathrow, but Opposition parties are claiming he may have known about it before the Dáil debate on Shannon last week.
Fine Gael TD for Limerick East, Kieran O'Donnell, accused Minister of State Tony Killeen of implying that Mr Dempsey had not been kept informed by his officials of the BMI rejection of the Shannon-Heathrow route.
Mr Killeen said yesterday on Clare FM that it was extremely unhelpful if there was information coming at a certain level in the Department of Transport and not being routed to the Minister.
"There is a lot of evidence that there are people in the department that have an agenda that is totally negative to Shannon. I remember one of my colleagues in the Dáil describing the department as a downtown office of Aer Lingus," Mr Killeen said.
Mr O'Donnell said the Minister's comments were the latest example of a Government Minister blaming their own staff rather than taking responsibility for their own actions.
"Nobody elected the officials in the Department of Transport that Minister Killeen is making accusations about," he said.
"But they did elect Fianna Fáil to govern the country. This extraordinary interview is part of a pattern of behaviour in Government where individual Ministers, who have collective responsibility for taking decisions, prefer to blame their own staff rather than take responsibility for their own actions.
"Minister Killeen is trying to paint a picture of poor old Noel Dempsey, whose staff are actively colluding against him. This is laughable.
"Every employee within the Department of Transport is accountable to the Minister. But Minister Dempsey and his colleagues seem to believe they are accountable to no one."
Labour Limerick East TD, Jan O'Sullivan said the disclosure that BMI would not be providing a replacement Shannon-Heathrow service was another bitter blow to the region and showed that the only way to ensure connectivity for industry in the west and midwest was to retain the Aer Lingus service.
"Reports that the Government may have been aware of the BMI decision in advance of the Dáil debate last week are particularly disturbing. If this were true it would be an extraordinary abuse of the Dáil by the Government," she said.
"The people of this region have been let down by Aer Lingus, by the Government and by its Fianna Fáil public representatives, and no amount of grandstanding on the part of Minister O'Dea can disguise that."
Mayor of Clare, Cllr Patricia McCarthy said the Government now had less than a week to salvage the service and the future economic viability of the west of Ireland as a deadline of October 11th had been set for receipt of submissions regarding slots at Heathrow in 2008.
"Instead of using its influence to seek a reversal of Aer Lingus's decision to move the Heathrow slots from Shannon to Belfast, this Government has conducted a cynical exercise in supposedly trying to attract BMI to take up the route. As far as I am aware, nothing more than an exchange of letters took place between both parties," she said.
The Siptu conference yesterday passed a special motion criticising the decision of Aer Lingus to withdraw from the Shannon-Heathrow route. Willie Hynes of the Aer Lingus branch said the next attack by Aer Lingus management would be on the slots at Heathrow that served Dublin and Cork.
Siptu national industrial secretary Michael Halpenny said in response to the news that BMI was not interested in providing a service from Shannon to Heathrow, that it was "further evidence of the absolutely appalling lapse of judgment by the Government in privatising Aer Lingus".
