Anyone but DAA should develop second terminal
Nothing could be further from the truth.
These are the same people who have so spectacularly mismanaged the first terminal, where all summer long Irish passengers and visitors have endured long queues to get in to, as well as get out of, the airport.
They have also been gouged by this rip-off monopoly for a 50% increase in car parking fees for no good reason other than it is a monopoly and they could get away with it.
The latest application for a 50% increase in passenger fees, five years before the second terminal facility will actually be delivered, is typical of the financial incompetence and mismanagement of the Irish public sector.
In no other industry would consumers be asked to pay for a facility five years before it is delivered.
There is a better way (mind you, in the case of Dublin airport it would be hard to find a worse way).
If one of the 13 separate proposals from the private sector were accepted to build and develop a competing second terminal, none of those developers could charge passengers anything until that terminal was open in five years’ time.
This would represent at least a five-year saving for hard-pressed tax payers and passengers.
Furthermore, when the competing terminal was open, the competition between it and the existing shambles at Dublin Airport would force down passenger charges at Dublin airport. This is simple economics.
Competition works. Monopolies don’t.
The Dublin Airport Authority is living, breathing proof on a daily basis that monopolies serve themselves, not consumers.
That’s why car parking charges this year jumped 50%. That’s why they want to increase passenger charges by 50% from next year.
That’s why they expect Irish taxpayers to waste half their holidays in queues at Dublin airport, while paying 50% more for the privilege, while the same incompetents who so spectacularly managed the first terminal build another monument to the ineptitude and incompetence of the Department of Transport and its semi-State monopolies.
Michael O’Leary
Chief Executive
Ryanair
Dublin Airport
Co Dublin
