Martin Kenny (Sligo-Leitrim, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

On developing and building a third terminal, Mr. Jacobs mentioned that this is not a plan even for the medium term. However, there may be circumstances in which the number of passengers will increase.

It was mentioned earlier that the population of the country is increasing, and is likely to continue to increase. We have approximately 600,000 pensioners in the country at the moment and we expect that the number will exceed 1 million in 25 years. It is said that we need four workers for each pensioner, so we will need 4 million workers. We are not going to produce them in Ireland so they will have to come from elsewhere. They will need to have somewhere to live, but they are also going to travel more because a lot of them are not going to be Irish people who were born and raised here so there is going to be that aspect of stress on the infrastructure as we look forward. In that context, is it wise for the DAA to be hedging its bets and making sure that it has the facilities, land and space to be able to develop in the future?