Timmy Dooley (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

As with previous speakers, I offer a warm welcome to Pádraig Ó Céidigh as the incoming chairperson of Shannon Airport. We should be particularly thankful that Mr. Ó Céidigh has chosen to put himself forward for this role. With his immense experience, undoubted ability and clear understanding of the needs of the region, he is the ideal candidate for the very difficult task ahead.

We owe Mr. Ó Céidigh a debt of gratitude. He is an exceptionally busy businessman with many other interests. That he will give time to a role like this for the region and the State should not go unnoticed and unrecognised. I thank him for that.

I will raise a couple of issues relating to Shannon. My colleague has already outlined many of the challenges and Mr. Ó Céidigh will be well aware of them. The focus is on driving traffic through the airport and I note Mr. Ó Céidigh's stated objective is to get back to 2019 levels. That will be challenging but I hope that in rebuilding to achieve 2019 levels of traffic at Shannon Airport, Mr. Ó Céidigh makes some fundamental changes to the foundations that are in place. In 2019, Shannon was losing competitive advantage to Dublin and Cork airports. To get back to the 2019 numbers would be good from this vantage point but Mr. Ó Céidigh will face a challenge creating different streams to ensure the airport can grow and rebuild from those levels. Mr. Ó Céidigh has the capacity to do that.

Mr. Ó Céidigh spoke about the property portfolio, which is an important feature of the airport. I would like to hear any thoughts or ideas he may have on that at this stage.

Mr. Ó Céidigh referred to the heritage tourism part of the business that is transferring to Clare County Council. It might be useful, notwithstanding that transfer of business, for Mr. Ó Céidigh to engage with some of the representatives of the heritage part of the business as part of his consultation process.

It is vital that Mr. Ó Céidigh engage at the earliest opportunity with the chambers of commerce and all the various stakeholders in the region, including the workers. I recommend that he consider holding a town-hall style meeting when conditions permit. From my experience, the airport workers are the most hardworking, decent and honourable people who have some fantastic ideas based on their lifetime experience working in the airport. That would be useful.

Mr. Ó Céidigh has a very committed CEO and management team, with whom he has engaged. That is to be welcomed.

The big short-term challenges will be to get Aer Lingus back on the Heathrow route with frequency and timings that meet the needs of the region. We want to see the single flight each day continue when Cork Airport reopens. My discussions with Aer Lingus suggest that is possible. However, while the flight to Heathrow is a welcome development, it is not adequate and does not meet the needs of the region. We need an early morning flight out of Shannon, as Mr. Ó Céidigh well knows, and a late evening return flight. Mr. Ó Céidigh indicated the airport will try to get back to three flights a day and use those slots, which will be a further challenge. As Mr. Ó Céidigh will be aware, Aer Lingus's commitment to the slot access to Heathrow has a life span and is up for review. It will be important to challenge to retain that slot access to Heathrow.

Transatlantic flights out of the United States are expected to restart in March 2022. While I welcome that, it would be helpful if Mr. Ó Céidigh could use his contacts and skills to broaden the reach in the United States from the east coast, as we have been used to.

The big challenge Mr. Ó Céidigh will find is that Shannon Airport does not have access to another European hub other than Heathrow. There are big efforts by the chambers of commerce and business interests in the region to try to get access to Frankfurt Airport or Schiphol Airport. Any assistance or guidance Mr. Ó Céidigh can give in relation to that would be helpful.

Mr. Ó Céidigh will note from his discussions with people in Galway, Clare, Limerick and throughout the west and mid-west, there is a desire to see a greater level of flight activity. In my view, the focus of Shannon Airport for the past seven or eight years has been on developing the Shannon Group's property assets. When the group reports its success at the end of the year, it is reported in terms of profit and loss, and it has been significantly profitable. Much of that profit is based on the success of the property assets in the Shannon Group's property portfolio. That often masks the failure to reach the kind of growth in passenger numbers that Dublin and Cork airports have recorded. Knowing Mr. Ó Céidigh as long as I do, he is a straight talker and straight shooter. I do not expect his board, when it announces results in the future, will talk only about pounds, shillings and pence. It will talk about passenger numbers through the airport and how its targets will be achieved. No one will give out if the board does not meet its targets. It is about the strategy for achieving them and I implore Mr. Ó Céidigh to work on the passenger numbers side of the business because that is what drives the region. Having property assets generating profits is lovely around the airport but the real win is when passengers come through, stay in hotels and guesthouses and eat in restaurants. I do not mind if they travel to counties other than County Clare but they will spend money along the western seaboard. They will visit the Cliffs of Moher. They only way that can happen is if we increase flight activity.

The way in which Shannon Airport developed was that it was expected to be sustained and to grow. When there was not enough capacity for business, the State intervened through Shannon Development and built factories. Is it now time for Shannon Airport to look at owning its own airline - setting up an airline to serve routes that are not already served? That is not to suggest that every route can be served. Is there an opportunity for Shannon Airport to set up an airline, a small one initially, with some State capital? Mr. Ó Céidigh will know better than I that the big leasing companies have a lot of aeroplanes on their balance sheet, many of which are not being leased. This could be a good time to try something like this. It certainly could be done in conjunction with the leasing companies. They would give favourable rates in the short term. With Mr. Ó Céidigh's experience with running an airline, I would like to hear his views on that. We would then be fully in control of operations rather than being at the whim of the airlines, all of which, with the exception of Ryanair, are international and are significantly stretched because of recent losses. It might be time for a small, new, fit-for-purpose airline getting access to relatively cheap aircraft on the international leasing markets.