Prospect of cargo hub deal for Shannon receives major boost

THE prospect of establishing a cargo hub at Shannon Airport has received a massive boost.

This follows strong signals from the chairman of the Dublin Airport Authority (DAA), David Dilger, that an agreement between global airport cargo company, Lynxs, and the DAA, on establishing the cargo hub at Shannon could happen in the next number of months.

Addressing a Shannon Chamber of Commerce lunch, Mr Dilger said: “I would be really hopeful that in the next number of months, we will move forward with that vision and with our partner and create it.”

Lynxs has put a proposal that the DAA fund the €7 million project and they will establish a hub at Shannon. The DAA and Lynxs entered a memorandum of understanding in 2009 to explore jointly the feasibility of developing the hub at Shannon.

Last year, the Department of Transport received the DAA’s evaluation of the business case for the project

Mr Dilger said that the “freight opportunity at Shannon that we are presented with is very interesting and very important for this region.”

He warned however: “But it does need to be addressed sensibly from the perspective of our company and earning a modicum level of return on investment for our company.”

Mr Dilger remarked that the major reason Shannon Airport “is as it is, is that successive governments have thrown money at it, sort of thoughtlessly and hoped that money thrown would result in what everybody wanted.

“I want to see a really modern, efficient, freight hub established at Shannon and the DAA will invest in that vision, but we will only invest in the vision if we can be reasonably confident of a decent return for that investment.

“We don’t have money to be throwing at problems anymore. We have negotiated with our prospective partners and it very hard to produce that result.”

“We don’t get a return other than very, very tiny level of aeronautical charge, all of the other benefits flow to the other stakeholders.

“The basis of our investment will be a reasonable level of return and I am talking about small levels of return.

“I am talking about a smaller level of return that you will ever dream of investing at the level of risk we are talking about in a similar project.

“We are looking for a small and reasonable level of return, I am confident that we will get it, it has been hard, it has taken a bit of time.”