DAA made incentive offer to maintain reduced service

THE Dublin Airport Authority was sufficiently concerned in June about the possible loss of Shannon Airport’s Heathrow slots that it contacted Aer Lingus with an incentive offer.

The DAA learned of Aer Lingus’s intentions on June 14 to cease its Shannon to Heathrow service to facilitate its first hub outside the Republic in Belfast.

The DAA was criticised this week by its subsidiary, Shannon Airport Authority (SAA), for not revealing that Aer Lingus was contemplating ditching the service.

The DAA argued it was bound by confidentiality.

But it has now emerged that the DAA contacted Aer Lingus to offer some form of incentive to maintain a reduced service.

Fine Gael yesterday seized on this detail to claim that there was a much greater urgency in June than has been admitted by the Department of Transport.

Transport spokesman Fergus O’Dowd said the disclosure showed the DAA were in active negotiation with Aer Lingus on the Shannon slots.

“This confirms there was a real, credible danger to the Shannon slots in mid-June.

“This fact undermines the assertion that the Belfast threat was not imminent. This threat was ignored and as a result the Shannon slots were lost,” he said.

Mr O’Dowd reiterated his party’s call for a full independent inquiry.

The new detail is contained in the second of two revisions Mr Murphy made on June 14 to the “‘Memo for the Minister’s Information”.

Neither the memo nor the two revisions were forwarded to the minister.

The two revisions came to light during a trawl of all documents, correspondence and email (including deleted emails that were restored by the department’s IT division). It showed that Mr Murphy had made some alterations to the original memo.

However, the new documents did not alter the conclusion of the earlier memo.

The second document contains the new information, indicating the DAA was so concerned that it contacted Aer Lingus in an effort to keep at least one of the slots in Shannon.

In the normal course of events, the two revisions of the memo would have been included in the records released under the FOI Act. It seems that both were deleted as email attachments sometime before the FOI request was made.