Mary O'Rourke toasting what she hopes will be the continuation of duty-free sales, with the French Transport Minister, Jean Claude Gayssot in Paris on Wednesday. Last week our Minister for Public Enterprise met her British counterpart John Prescott, a former ferry worker on the North Sea, and on Tuesday she was in Bonn to lobby German minister, Mathias Wissmann. Gayssot agreed to her plea for a study on the effects of the abolition of dutyfree.
The other two were sympathetic, so she is hopeful that when the Transport Council meets in Brussels on St Patrick's Day she will get her way. A study might at least postpone the abolition from the June 1999 date. To ease their path she will be presenting council members with bottles of Irish whiskey, duty-free of course, just as she gave to Gayssot.