Kieran O'Donnell (Limerick City, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Mr. Walsh will appreciate that I am a Deputy for Limerick City and Limerick west, including Shannon Airport. I want to pick up on his observation that where there are airports that are dominant, a lack of competition must have good regulation. Ireland is a small island. We are not that unlike Holland in one sense. We are going over to Schiphol tomorrow. It diverts flights to Rotterdam. We are going to both airports to see how they work. We want to see what is happening there. Here, the percentage of all traffic coming through one airport on the eastern seaboard is in the high 80s. We have four other airports with maybe up to about 30% of the traffic volume coming through. Mr. Walsh said that if there were two hubs here, it would be a bad mistake. Why would that be the case? Shannon has a capacity of about 4.5 million passengers, so we are not looking for a huge number. Obviously, we very much welcome that transatlantic flights are back, Heathrow is back and Chicago is coming on stream in the US market, but I am talking about that prized hub. Mr. Walsh referred to the slots in the likes of Schiphol being highly prized. I presume he would include Frankfurt in that as well.