Dr. Catríona Cahill:

I thank the Deputy for his questions and agree with him that now is quite a good time to look at Irish aviation policy given that its last iteration dates from 2015. Aviation policy is generally due for review every five years but as far as we are aware, at the end of last year the plan was to review whether Cork Airport should remain as part of the Dublin Airport Authority, DAA. That was on the cards because a commitment was made previously that Cork Airport would be looked at after Shannon Airport had separated from the DAA. There is merit in extending the review of aviation policy in 2020 to look at wider issues.

Schiphol Airport is an interesting case study. In my opening statement I spoke about the fact that an aircraft movement cap was introduced. In 2018 an advisory board also recommended that non-hub related traffic should be redistributed to other airports in the Netherlands. This recommendation was made for a number of reasons, one of which was environmental impact and the question of how big is too big in the context of airports. That is where the recommendation came from and in 2019, the Netherlands took the first step towards addressing that and redistributing some of the traffic. They got agreement from the European Commission for traffic distribution rules between Schiphol Airport and Lelystad Airport. The overall change that has occurred is quite significant. In its analysis, Copenhagen Economics looked at airport concentration in other European countries and the Netherlands was the only country which had a higher significant market share held by the capital airport than Ireland.

The message that Copenhagen Economics was trying to get across is that action is being taken elsewhere to reverse these damaging patterns that have come about in recent years.

With regard to the second question, on strategic routes and in particular Frankfurt, within the Copenhagen Economics study the Frankfurt analysis showed that if a regular route were developed, with services twice daily and once a day at weekends, the value to the regional economy - not the full economy - would be €412 million and could help support 2,500 jobs, which is quite significant. This links in with the final question and what the Deputy highlighted with regard to Tourism Ireland and the fund that is there at the moment. In 2019, the only support for routes from regional airports was a marketing support led by Tourism Ireland. In budget 2020, an additional support package of €2.5 million was given to help develop routes from regional airports but we have not seen much of that, given circumstances that have come about in the meantime.

In its report, Copenhagen Economics highlighted the disconnect at present between aviation policy in Ireland, and our foreign direct investment strategy and enterprise policy. That the responsibility to date has been Tourism Ireland's shows we have an over-emphasis on the development of tourism routes rather than business routes. This will become an issue in the long term because our regional economic policy greatly depends on the idea of clustering, which I mentioned earlier, and how we agglomerate economic activity within a particular region. As of now, there is no connectivity to identify clustering opportunities in the regions against what types of routes are being developed by the airports in the regions, and this disconnect needs to be addressed. When we speak to the creation of a route to support strategic development, we are drawing from what Copenhagen Economics has stated with regard to the oversight for route development extending beyond Tourism Ireland, with other organisations such as IDA and Enterprise Ireland perhaps having more of a say on how that develops.