Mr. Willie Walsh:

Yes. Dublin has done extremely well. From memory, Dublin was the No. 10 or 11 airport in Europe in 2019 with approximately 33 million passengers. It does extremely well, particularly when one takes the population of Ireland into account. We might look at Switzerland, which has two principal airports, namely, Geneva and Zurich. Zurich is the hub airport, of which there is only one. Geneva is not a hub airport. Zurich is slightly bigger than Dublin in terms of passenger numbers. In 2019, it had approximately 33 million. Geneva had approximately 17 million. As I said, Geneva is ten times the size of Shannon. Shannon had approximately 1.7 million or 1.8 million. Zurich was similar in size to Dublin. The population of Switzerland is not far off the population of Ireland. Therefore, I see some similarities there. As I said, however, what Geneva has is very different from what Shannon has. We need to bear that in mind. Geneva is not a hub airport. It has very few long-haul services, for example. It has a couple of long-haul airlines flying in there but very limited long-haul services. Trying to create two hub airports in Ireland would be a big mistake. We have seen other countries and, indeed, cities where they have tried to do that. Investment in London Gatwick to create a hub to compete with London Heathrow was a complete failure, and a very expensive one, both for airlines and for the airport. There is certainly scope to encourage traffic to fly into the other airports in Ireland, particularly on the back of tourism and foreign investment that we have seen in the country.