Gerry Horkan (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank Mr. Ó Céidigh for his attendance. We all forget how valuable pre-clearance is as an asset. I presume that even those private jets can use it if they are coming in at all hours. They cannot do that in Luton or in loads of other places. It is important to know that one has pre-clearance when one lands in America. A flight could be delayed and it happened to me one time; we were supposed to be going to Chicago and the runway there was covered in snow so we were in Milwaukee for four hours. I got back to Chicago and made my flight connection by about ten minutes but I had a four-hour gap. If I did not have pre-clearance I never would have made that flight because one is walking into the airport as a domestic passenger. Maybe we do not sell that enough from the point of view of Dublin Airport and Shannon Airport but we are talking about Shannon Airport today.

The fact that Mr. Ó Céidigh knows so much about Dublin Airport is a good benefit. Having had his airline based there and having worked there means he knows that side of it. We have talked a lot about inbound tourism, in respect of people coming into the country and Shannon Airport creating tourist business. Equally there is the home-grown market of 30 million to 31 million passengers who have historically flown out of Dublin Airport. We are talking about figures of 400,000 passengers per year. That was four days of Dublin Airport traffic at the height of the boom; it was doing 100,000 passengers per day. Dublin Airport does not need to fear Shannon Airport. If Shannon Airport went to full capacity in the morning, it would still only be 4 million passengers or so. It will not suck 31 million passengers away from Dublin Airport; it is a tiny redistribution. I will be and I am pro-Dublin Airport but that should not be at Shannon Airport's expense and it does not have to be.

This is not a reflection on any individual but in the past ten years, since 2011, every single Minister with responsibility for transport at Cabinet level has been based in Dublin. The last non-Dublin based Minister responsible for transport at Cabinet was Noel Dempsey. We had Deputies Varadkar and Donohoe, Shane Ross and Deputy Eamon Ryan. That is not a bad thing but it shows that we all focus on our areas more than on other areas. We all know we have to mind our bases and maybe Shannon Airport has suffered a little bit from that.

I am around long enough to remember when Séamus Brennan was the Minister talking about and implementing the break-up of the airport. At the time Shannon Airport was probably crying out for that because it felt that Dublin Airport kept saying "No" to anything it wanted to do and that if it was independent, it could then do things. That has not worked out the way people might have thought but at the time - and I remember the discussions about it - it was said that Shannon Airport was being squashed by Dublin Airport, that it would not let Shannon Airport do what it wanted and that Dublin Airport wanted everything for itself. Shannon Airport was given the wings to do its own thing and lots of things have happened in the meantime, including Covid.

It is important that Shannon Airport and Cork Airport work. That is for everybody's benefit, not just for those regions. It is also beneficial to people in the Dublin region. I wish Mr. Ó Céidigh the best and I look forward to going to see Shannon Airport and the wider Shannon zone whenever that is possible. Mr. Ó Céidigh can be assured of my support and he will have the support of all the committee. As for the question of an executive chairman versus a non-executive chairman, whatever needs to be done in order to make Shannon Airport the best should be done. I do not want to undermine the chief executive and nobody wants to do that but equally, Mr. Ó Céidigh brings a lot of skills to the position and the argument that he would be more hands-on than a normal chairperson for a period has a lot of merit to it and could be examined further.