Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Wednesday, 19 June 2024
Joint Oireachtas Committee on Transport, Tourism and Sport
Summer Plans for Dublin and Cork Airports: DAA
1:10 pm
Timmy Dooley (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source
I welcome Mr. Jacobs and his team. They are before the committee again. It is good to have them.
I have a couple of questions. On the second runway, will the representatives give us some idea of the positive impact that has had in getting aeroplanes away in the early morning and at peak times? I still hear from people who use Dublin Airport that there is still some congestion, especially in the early mornings. How might Dublin Airport get better efficiencies? Is it planned to get better efficiencies there? I assume some of it is connected with flight paths, which were talked about for other reasons. Maybe they will expand on that shortly.
The next issue I will talk a little about is the whole Shannon-Cork issue. I am on record with most of the witnesses over time as saying that I disagreed with independence for Shannon, which was presented as a major positive for the region. In truth, it has not been, notwithstanding the team there. Mary Considine and the board have done an amazing job against a very difficult backdrop of coming through Covid. They have worked very hard and had some major successes, but we are now seeing the culmination of what I predicted a number of years ago. We have seen that Dublin Airport has effectively sucked in a lot of the growth in traffic, as a result of growth in much of the tourist market, over the past number of years. It is now reaching a point where the DAA is starting to incentivise people to move back to other airports. The starting point is to incentivise Cork Airport, as Mr. MacCarthy rightly identified. Why would it not be incentivised - it is part of the DAA group. That is why Shannon is now, sadly, suffering. It is on the periphery of the group.
I still think there is an opportunity. I very much welcome that Mary Considine has remained in close contact with Dublin Airport, notwithstanding the separation, to try to ensure that the airports are not competitors. Truthfully, Shannon will never compete with Dublin because of the size and scale it has. What more can be done to assist the growth of Shannon and to assist Dublin Airport in being able to maintain that cap without breaching it while, at the same time, all of us with the green jersey on try to ensure that Ireland gets the next few aircraft that Mr. O'Leary decides to present, rather than Portugal, Britain, Scotland or wherever? I will let the witnesses answer those two bits. I will then come back to them.
No comments