Limerick Chamber: Dublin Airport's 'monopoly' must end for the sake of regional airports
Limerick Chamber Chief Executive Dee Ryan has said the volume of footfall at Dublin Airport is 'not sustainable'. Picture: Gerard McCarth
Limerick Chamber has called for wider aviation policy in response to the mayhem witnessed at Dublin Airport in recent weeks.
The business representative group has called on ministers Eamon Ryan and Hildegarde Naughton to establish a working group to review aviation policy on a national level.
“What happened last weekend was a direct result of not managing Dublin Airport growth over the past two decades.
“The laissez-faire approach of the State has allowed Dublin Airport grow to unnecessary scale,” said Limerick Chamber CEO Dee Ryan.
This is not the first time Ms Ryan has been outspoken against what she called the “imbalanced” aviation industry in Ireland.
In April, before the chaos at Dublin Airport reached boiling point on the last weekend in May where over 1,000 people missed flights, Ms Ryan urged the Department of Transport to use regional airports to solve the delays and queues being experienced in Dublin Airport since the start of the year.
“Regrettably, one of the hallmarks of Dublin Airport’s expansion has been the ruthless pursuit of passenger growth at the expense of other Irish airports and regions,” she reiterated again this week.
Ms Ryan said new aviation policy must be aimed at developing incentives to drive passenger growth at other Irish airports, which would be in the best interest of balanced regional development.
“The figures speak for themselves. Pre-Covid, between January 2013 and December 2019, passenger growth at Cork Airport was 250,000, while Shannon grew by 300,000. Dublin Airport during that same period grew passenger numbers by 14m,” she says.
“In a year, for example, when Ireland got 1m new passengers, 960,000 of those would be for Dublin, and 40,000 for our other airports.
“That is simply not sustainable,” she added.
Ms Ryan recently said that Dublin airports “monopoly” is an outlier by EU standards.
“If you look at Germany, for example, its fifth-largest city, Frankfurt, has the country’s largest airport, with more than double the traffic levels of its capital and largest city, Berlin,” she said.
She added that while a short-term fix was needed to make sure passengers get on their flights in Dublin, there is associated international reputational damage and the crisis could not be allowed pass without dealing with the underlying problem.
Earlier this year, Ms Ryan welcomed a Government announcement of funding for State-owned airports through the Regional Airports Programme.
Cork and Shannon airports received almost €10m to boost infrastructure after qualifying for regional funding for the first time due to the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The two Munster airports were never eligible for funding under the Regional Airports Programme previously, with the likes of Kerry, Knock, and Donegal the focus of previous rounds.
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