Michael Moynihan: Any notion of transferring flights from Dublin to Cork is up in the air

Cork Airport has the capacity to absorb plenty more international passengers

Passengers queue to get into the Departures at Terminal 2, Dublin Airport, on Sunday. Picture: Colin Keegan, Collins Dublin

Tuesday morning, an Irish airport.

This is the scene: a bright, airy concourse, with people strolling casually from car reservation desk to coffee shop to security check-in. Gentle hum of conversation. Plenty of space. No queues. Calm.

Tricked you, sorry. That was the scene in Cork Airport earlier this week, not Dublin.

The chaos in Dublin Airport isn’t funny: I’m not here to get a cheap laugh at the expense of those trying to make flights there. There’s a lot of laboured humour about starting to queue for your flight in the Wicklow Mountains and so on, but having to stand in line for hours or eventually miss your flight - what we see filtering through from the front lines of Dublin Airport - isn’t a laughing matter (though lines is certainly the operative term).

When you come down to it, international air travel is a dislocating, profoundly unsettling experience. You’re in one country but then you’re in another country altogether: the sense of discomfiture isn’t notional. Having the journey begin in an atmosphere of uncertainty, weariness, aggression - sometimes all three at once, to judge by testimony from the capital - casts a shadow over the entire trip.

I’m aware that someone trailing their own travel experiences in print is no better than someone who wants to share information about their children’s achievements in primary school, but I have a specific reason for empathising with those trying to reach their flights in Dublin. As someone who landed into JFK in New York back in the eighties, I find myself in sympathy with anyone struggling to try to reach their flights, though I presume no-one in Dublin is asked, as I was back then, if they are now or have ever been a member of the Communist Party.

My point is there’s a particular tone to the dread, a sick weariness, I associate with being in an unhappy crowd at an airport. Solidarity with those in Dublin.

All of that formed my motivation for driving up to Cork Airport on Tuesday morning. To see if an alternative was possible. And the immediate reaction is to say that it is.

For how long, though?

People at Dublin Airport where 'chaotic' scenes over last weekend led to more than 1,000 passengers missing their flights. Picture: PA

You may have noticed a gathering murmur about the future of air travel out of Ireland, a murmur focused on moving flights out of Dublin, where the current system appears not to be fit for purpose, and moving those flights to airports which have the capacity to absorb them: the likes of Shannon, Knock and . . . Cork.

Is that likely? Not in the short term, certainly.

The lack of a clear subject for the verb ‘moving’ in the paragraph above is the giveaway. Those in charge of the flights are the airlines - not the airport, and not the government. If an airline decides that there’s a market for flights from airport X to destination Y, then it runs flights from airport X; those flights aren’t run out of airport X because of a temporary issue with capacity in airport Y.

As an aside, if you think the ‘outcry’ about queueing for hours in Dublin Airport is loud at present, imagine the reaction if people in the greater Dublin area were told that the flights they had booked at the airport a few miles away were now departing from another airport nearly three hours’ drive away.

You’d be sorely in need of those little plastic ear plugs that you can pick up . . . at the airport.

That kind of clarity is important given the whirl of rumour and suggestion which springs up around events like the Dublin Airport queues. And also in the wider ecosystem of urban legends, which has a rather longer shelf life.

For instance, while researching a book on Cork in the eighties your columnist found recurring suggestions that in the economic firestorm which swept Leeside in that decade the viability of Cork Airport became a live topic at Cabinet at least once. Difficult though that might be to believe now, this was the decade in which a hospital in Cork was closed. It was a decade which anything seemed possible, though not in the Hallmark card sense of that phrase.

More routes for Cork airport

As a barometer of Cork’s general economic health the airport is an interesting test case.

For instance, this year, 2022, there are 40 routes out of Cork Airport, a far cry from the two routes - two - during the worst of the pandemic.

Those two routes? They were to London and Amsterdam, the two major hubs for onward connections to truly exotic locations. Thankfully the days of gardaí manning the approach road to check people’s bona fides for travelling are gone: the number of passengers using Cork Airport in 2021 was 250,000. The last year numbers were at that level was 1987.

Digging deeper, the old Cork Airport building saw a 2 million passenger year in 2003 (it had broken the 1 million passenger barrier in 1996). As a graph telling the story of economic improvement in the city and surrounding area it’s hard to argue with, though by the very early 2000s the pressure on facilities in the old building was clear.

(True confession time: relatives of your columnist, professional builders, built one of the extensions to the old airport building back in the nineties, and on one summer holiday from college your columnist joined them working there. The quality of my contribution can be gauged by one of those cousins asking me to please never tell anyone I did any work there. “Just don’t, okay? For everyone’s sake.”) 

Passenger numbers broke the 3 million in 2006, the year after the new terminal opened and reached a record 3.25 million in 2008. The economic crash saw numbers plummet but they were recovering, all the way up to 2.6 million in 2019, before covid struck.

Cork Airport has the capacity to absorb plenty more passengers. Picture: Larry Cummins

The obvious question here is the capacity of Cork Airport, which is set at five million passengers, but capacity is the operative term. A spokesperson for Cork Airport compared that figure to driving at the absolute last notch of a car’s speedometer: it could be theoretically possible to do so but it mightn’t be advisable to find out and you certainly wouldn’t want to be operating at that level all the time.

Cork Airport, therefore, is a facility with the capacity to absorb plenty more passengers - specifically those who wish to access a major tourism hub which doubles as a centre of the tech industry. Cork Airport has a unique combination waiting down the long hill into town: Apple and the Wild Atlantic Way.

With that in mind, an idea worth skewering is the adequacy of the runways in Cork Airport. Contrary to myth, those runways can comfortably accommodate larger planes such as those flying transatlantic routes. That kind of connectivity is a long-standing aim and, I’m reliably informed, an objective which is always on the table.

When I left Cork Airport last Tuesday there were queues forming, but nothing apocalyptic. The atmosphere was calm and businesslike. Long may it continue.

Just don't look too closely at some of the plasterwork in the old terminal.