Dr. Adrian Corcoran:

Our role here is prescribed in the slot regulations. There are a number of key functions there. The first is that if the capacity of an airport is not sufficient to deal with demand, it becomes slot co-ordinated. In Ireland, that applies only to Dublin Airport. At certain times of the day, there is more demand than there is capacity, which is why we have a role here.

Our role then moves on from that point. Once it is decided that an airport is capacity constrained and needs to be slot co-ordinated, we set the capacity. When we are setting the capacity, we have an obligation to maximise the capacity of the airport. It involves looking at the infrastructure that is there and seeing what the maximum capacity is that can be put through each of those different processors for a particular hour, or a ten-minute period in the case of the runway.