Mr. Niall MacCarthy:

I am managing director of Cork Airport. I am wholly accountable and responsible for efficient and safe operations in Cork Airport, reporting directly to Mr. Jacobs with the management team in Cork. It is a pleasure to be here.

Cork Airport, pictured in the presentation, is a clean, modern, well-maintained building. We pride ourselves on that. Some members have had the pleasure of travelling through Cork. Senator Dooley may have had that pleasure, as he resides locally. It is very nice. It is akin to terminal 2 in Dublin Airport. Our hard-working maintenance team is also pictured. There it is in winter operations mode, cleaning snow and whatever. We have a good maintenance team and staff at the airport.

We have 48 service routes. It is hard to see on the slide, but they are the pink dots across Ireland, the UK and continental Europe. We have three new routes this year, namely, Brussels Charleroi, Rhodes in Greece and Zadar in Croatia. In a smaller airport hub connectivity is important. What is a hub? It is a bigger airport where travellers can connect, largely to long-haul routes. We as a small region will not have daily flights to Dubai or Istanbul, so people need to get to a hub to travel to those places. We fly 28 times a week to Heathrow and 14 times a week, twice a day, to Amsterdam, which is an emerging hub for us and is really popular with passengers. We also fly to three other hubs in continental Europe, including Charles de Gaulle. This year we will grow by 7%. We will proudly handle 3 million passengers. That is a 50% increase since 2015. We have 40,000 flights per annum. That is almost evenly split between commercial and non-commercial flights. Commercial flights are big aircraft flying people in and out on their holidays. We also have a flight training school, Atlantic Flight Training Academy, at the airport and quite a lot of the non-commercial flights are training new pilots. We also have search and rescue, Irish military, coastguard and medical evacuation flights. The non-commercial flights are hugely important to the region. We have eight scheduled carriers. The ones carrying the bulk of our passengers are Aer Lingus and Ryanair, but we have diversified significantly. We have Air France flying to Charles de Gaulle, KLM flying to Schiphol, Lufthansa flying to Frankfurt and SWISS, Emerald and TUI flying to other destinations.

I assure the committee Cork Airport is well prepared for summer 2024. We take it very seriously every year. We have a detailed plan for the summer that we finalise in January. The plan itself is about 40 pages and we go through everything. I will quickly run through it. We are quite seasonal. Most airports are. Our July and August traffic is about twice what the January and February traffic is, so different levels of staffing are needed in the summer compared with the winter. We take on seasonal summer staff, especially in the car parks, retail and security. The complexity in airports is they have to be background-vetted by the Garda, so we cannot just hire them on a Monday to start on the Tuesday. They have to wait for maybe five weeks before they get their background clearance and start work. We are fully staffed for summer.

A total of 95% of our passengers will get through in less than 15 minutes. In the afternoons, people get through in five minutes. When it is quite busy, they get through in ten minutes, and the first wave peak is 15 minutes. That is all electronically monitored and independently recorded, so we do not give those times as they are electronically read. Everything in the car park is within a five-minute walk. We have three car parks, namely, blue, red and multistorey. We will never tell people to come to the airport more than 90 minutes before departure. As a matter of fact, people will make it at 60 minutes, but over the summer it is probably a bit tight, but we will give, and have given, a summer advisory of 90 minutes. We have four restaurants, two separate coffee docks, including an executive lounge, and we are opening a new unit, Roasted Notes, on 8 July.

I am conscious of time, so I will move through fairly quickly. We pride ourselves on cleanliness. Red C surveys our passengers independently. They are asked a set of questions like how was security, cleaning and friendliness of staff. We get 91% on cleaning. It is a clean terminal. We offer free-of-charge disability services for people with reduced mobility. We have a lanyard scheme for people with hidden disabilities. We have a sensory room for autistic children travelling with families and we have an assisted guide dog scheme. We are a green airport. I am really proud of this one. SEAI is the authority in Ireland for sustainability. Cork Airport is the best-performing commercially owned body – not airport, body – in the country out of I think 80 when it comes to carbon reduction. On overall satisfaction, again by Red C, we won best regional airport in Europe in 2017 and 2019 and we score between 94% and 95% satisfaction.

We are at the last slide. We have great staff. I am very proud of them. They are friendly and work hard. We have a lot of electronics in the building. Using my phone I can tell how many taxis are outside right this minute as they are electronically counted. I can see the number of people in the immigration and security queue right here right now. All of our staff have access to high technology. The screen that says we expect travellers to be five minutes in the queue is predictive analytics, not somebody typing in a number. I am showing real photos of the terminal. They have not been Photoshopped. That is how clean the floors are and we pride ourselves on that. There is a photo of Cork Airport winning best regional airport in Europe back in 2019. We might be able to convince Deputies O’Rourke, Smith, Farrell and Kenny to travel down to Cork for their summer holidays this year.