Mr. Basil Geoghegan:

The Deputy asked about four or five issues there so I will try address them all. On the Covid measures and the Covid certificate, that is all working quite well now. There was pretty good co-operation among all the various State agencies to get that up and running in such a way that when it came in we did not have big delays for people coming in through passport control and so on. That is working reasonably well. The one thing that probably made a difference was that people started coming to the airport a lot earlier because they were aware of all this. That was an issue because we ended up with queues at the wrong times, which the predictive models did not show, but we have tried to get on top of that. We had an issue in August for which we put our hand up.

On attracting more airlines to the airport, one of the things that is very important is the flexibility of the airport in that regard. Different airlines have different requirements about check-in and what facilities they have. Some use third parties, some use their own staff and some are more focused on different types of customers or transferring. We try to make sure we can be as flexible as possible to meet their needs. One example, which we may not be getting back to quickly, was when we had Chinese airlines flying into Dublin. The availability of hot water to passengers was very important to them. We made sure we had that available but at the same time, many of our concessionaires were selling cups of tea and did not want resourceful Irish people bringing their own tea bags and making their own cups of tea. It is about trying to work through some of these things to make sure everybody can be happy. Then there is a virtuous circle because the more flights an airport has and the more opportunities for connectivity, the better it becomes as a destination for concessionaires. We need to make sure we get that up and running again. It is about the speed we can get into it in order to get back to where we were before. We have to look at the other airports around Europe and make sure that, just because they started earlier, they are not eating our lunch before we even get to lunch.