The Minister for Public Enterprise, Ms O'Rourke, has said there is no Aer Lingus report into the 1968 Tuskar Rock air crash. She has also spoken of salvage being handed over to a British ship by the Naval Service.
Speaking on RTE's Questions and Answers programme last night, Ms O'Rourke said she had asked an assistant secretary in her Department to contact Aer Lingus yesterday to ask about the unpublished internal report to the airline's board on the crash. This report was referred to by a former senior executive of the airline as recently as last week.
However, the Minister said the report was "not there, not physically there". Her official had found that there was "no written report". All that existed were the oral presentations made by Aer Lingus to the people drafting the government report, which was published in 1970.
"I can't believe it", Ms O'Rourke said. She noted that, "in modern terms of compiling reports and keeping and collating information", 1968 was not that long ago.
Asked whether there was any record of an Aer Lingus report which had gone missing, the Minister said there was not. "There was no report ever given to what was then the Department of Transport on Tuskar Rock."
When she had appealed for new information about the crash, she had received a "very interesting letter" from a retired lieutenant-commander in the Naval Service, Ms O'Rourke said. He had been serving at a more junior rank on the LE Macha at the time of the crash and the subsequent search for wreckage.
He had telephoned his superior officer to find out what should be done with "a piece of salvage" taken on board the Macha. He was told to "give it to the British ship" helping in the salvage operation, which he did, and it was "sent away". This was the first time he had spoken about this episode, the Minister said.
She also said that, following her recent meeting with the British ambassador, Dame Veronica Sutherland, to discuss the Tuskar Rock crash, they had both agreed that the two officials in her Department in charge of investigating air accidents should meet their counterparts in the British Ministry of Defence to "review all the existing information they have on file".