Cathal Crowe (Clare, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Shannon Airport in my constituency can increase its passenger take fourfold, by up to 10 million, without changing a single thing or adding a single brick to the building. Dublin, on the other hand, has to look at expansion. There is all the stuff with An Coimisiún Pleanála, which is a separate debate. Let us leave that over there. Nevertheless, Dublin is pretty much at capacity and needs to grow if it wants to continue fulfilling those passenger trends. Shannon can increase fourfold, while Cork and Knock have capacity. On that metric, the IAA is coming up way short. In particular, it is coming up way short when it comes to Project Ireland 2040 and the national planning framework because every single State agency we could bring before this committee, such as the ESB and the HSE, must have cognisance of regional development and balancing things out. A total of 13 flights per day take off from Dublin to Amsterdam Schiphol. Shannon has no hub connectivity to Schiphol and all of those outward routes it provides so that is not regional development. As we review these important State documents and review, as a Government, how we better strike that national balance of regional development, could we include the criterion, if it is not explicitly there already, that there would have to be balanced consideration in slot allocation and approving these airlines to land and take off?