Mr. Basil Geoghegan:

That is great; I thank the Senator very much. To answer some of his questions on the numbers, between Cork and Dublin airports, before Covid-19 we were just between 35 million and 36 million passengers. It was 32.9 million passengers at Dublin Airport. That dropped to 7.9 million for last year. To put it in context, a busy day at Dublin Airport pre-Covid would have had 100,000 passengers going through the airport. We were running many days at 2,000, and 3,000 or those kinds of numbers during the longer lockdown periods. There were flights coming in from the US with four people on them and that kind of thing. It was, therefore, kind of a ghost town. That is where it has fallen to. The Senator did not ask the question but we are now back at somewhere just below 50% on some days, such as this weekend. Next weekend, it will be higher but we are kind of back at 50%.

Europe is back at higher levels but, again, Europe opened earlier so there is a little bit of a competitive challenge we have there because other people were able to get out of the gate earlier. That really goes partly towards the Senator's question around Aer Lingus moving aircraft to Manchester. I still believe that the proposition at Dublin and Cork airports is as strong as it ever was and that we will get back to those levels and beyond in due course. Even if I look at the number of airlines at Cork Airport, for example, we are going to be back next year at a higher number of airlines than we were before. Destinations may not be quite the same but we are driving back there. It is a combination between the different airports of what one can offer and whether it is a lot of people travelling for business. Are those people actually travelling from Ireland and back or coming from abroad? It is, therefore, where they come from. Again, in Dublin Airport, a lot will be around transit. The US reopening is very important for Dublin Airport because that is much of that proposition. It is interesting to see.

Our airline customers are incredibly mobile with their aircraft. We saw Aer Lingus moving to Manchester because it believed it could fly full planes out of there. If we look at the airports in the North in Belfast, they picked up far more flights and destinations during Covid-19 because people could not fly out of Dublin, Cork or Shannon airports or anywhere here. Many of those have actually now been reversed and we are seeing them coming back. We think, therefore, that we will be as competitive as we ever were.

That then kind of takes us on to the question around charges. I have not got the exact details of where we are, which I am very happy to share with the Senator, against say the Copenhagen or Manchester airports of the world as opposed to London, Frankfurt and Schiphol. We are incredibly competitive on a comparative basis and we have to be. We know that European airlines are thinking about where they are going. They know they have enough time to fly to somewhere in Europe and back during the day. We compete with Copenhagen, for example, for that aeroplane. That is the way competition works between airports. That is, therefore, the way we must position ourselves. I think we are confident on that piece. Even if we were back at the level we were at before, which was €9.50, we would be in a good position with regard to investing. Equally, I think our passenger charges would still be very low. We have not really seen evidence that if one reduces passenger charges at least by that amount, one immediately boosts airline activity.

The Senator is correct in his question around our revenue. Passenger and landing charges are by far our biggest revenue raisers. The important thing, however, is that anything around concessions, car parks, etc., is still regulated. It is still within the regulatory till from the regulators perspective, therefore, it still counts to what we are allowed to earn to meet our needs. We have relatively little unregulated income at the airport. That is one of the reasons why, albeit small, our Aer Rianta International, ARI, and DAA International, DAAI, business are also important. They generate unregulated income and give us an opportunity to grow staff and other opportunities.

The Senator asked when it is going to come back. I spent a huge amount of my time with airlines, airports and operators around the world and the question is when do we get back to these levels? The optimists thought it was 2023. I think 2025 is probably the time to think about. We have taken the steps through taking out cost so that we are confident we can get to a level of being kind of close to break-even or around break-even, depending on the exact number of passengers. We really need to be back in the high twenties in order to have a proper positive profit contribution.