Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 15 February 2023

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Transport, Tourism and Sport

National Aviation Policy (Resumed): Regional Airports

Mr. John Mulhern:

Kerry wants to grow. It is very important to us to grow. We have had to change our business model completely because of things that have happened to us, like the loss of the PSO. We also know we have a responsibility to balance the books. In order to do that, we had to take almost €1 million off the payroll, so we had to make a lot of people redundant. We had to let them go and we had to stop recruiting. We had to limit our hours of operation. The majority of our passengers are in the summer season. Not only that, but we were one of the busiest airports in the State for private traffic. For example, a golf course where I live in south Kerry will bring 60 private jets this summer, between the end of April and mid-October, so we will have a significant increase in private traffic, but not on the commercial side. We need space. We cannot accommodate the number of passengers, so we need to grow very quickly, not next year or the year after but this year.

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