Mr. Niall MacCarthy:

There is no obstacle or block. We cannot dictate to an airline where to go. We cannot dictate. We can incentivise. From a Cork perspective, we have great relationships with the airlines that fly there, including Ryanair, Aer Lingus and all the others. We meet them frequently. We will offer enhanced incentives for the next two and a half years to move air traffic that is taken specifically out of Dublin to Cork Airport. We will incentivise that financially, but we must take that air traffic out of Dublin to move it to Cork. We have to make money. We are self-financing and get nothing from the Government. However, we will offer incentives for specially targeting the moving of air traffic. That will go to our board this Friday for approval. We cannot dictate, however. Even Michael O'Leary will say that airlines make the decision where to put aircraft.

The other point is airlines are now nervous that if they start moving aircraft around, it will prove that the cap was right in the first instance. They are more inclined to move aircraft abroad to prove that there should be a free market. We have created a scarcity thing, whereby airlines want to stay in Dublin because they are fearful that if they move from there, they will never get it back. Sometimes, when a policy goes in a certain direction, the opposite to what was intended happens. We will financially incentivise routes to move from Dublin to Cork to see whether those incentives will work.