Mr. Dalton Philips:

It is a very fair challenge. I would say that neither Dublin Airport nor Cork Airport sets the market; passengers set the market. Airlines choose where they will travel based on passenger demand. Dublin Airport competes for routes against Manchester, Copenhagen and Vienna airports, for example, rather than against Shannon or Cork airports. When a large airline has a new aircraft to deploy, it will deploy it between two points on a map. If it thinks there is a market, it will deploy its aircraft to that end. We will be competing against all these other airports to win that business. We have to demonstrate for Dublin, and also for Ireland. In many cases, we are represented with the Industrial Development Authority, Enterprise Ireland, Tourism Ireland and Fáilte Ireland. We go in as a bloc to say to Qatar Airways, for example, that it should put the aircraft on the Doha-Dublin route, rather than the Doha-Copenhagen route, because this is the size of the market. A route lost to Dublin is a route lost to Ireland. It is not an issue of whether it is Dublin Airport or Shannon Airport. The airlines will choose where they go based on the demand.

On the question of the runway, we are near completion. Dublin Airport has been operating at capacity for many years now. We have the greatest admiration for what Ms Considine and the team do in Shannon Airport. This is not about us winning a Doha flight from Qatar Airways in a competition between Dublin Airport and Shannon Airports - it is about us competing with airports like those in Copenhagen, Manchester or Vienna.