Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I agree with the Deputy. I was going to bring it up when I was answering Deputies Doherty and Catherine Murphy earlier but I did not have time. Out of what has happened in Dublin Airport in the past few weeks and last Sunday in particular, we looked to see if we could bring people up from Shannon Airport to help in the immediate crisis but that was not possible. We need to look the other way to see if we could bring people down. I do not disagree with the Deputy. We have an imbalanced country. It is not just that all the flights are coming in and out of Dublin; all the roll-on, roll-off trucks are coming in and out of Dublin. Half the housing is in the greater Dublin region. We need better balanced regional development. There is no two ways about it. Particularly, we need the cities of Cork, Galway, Waterford and Limerick to grow as poles of attraction.

I agree with the Deputy about Shannon Airport having a real potential role in that. That is why right through this crisis, I did not just meet Dublin Airport but went down to Shannon Airport. I was very impressed with the management team there, I will be honest. I thought they were really top notch. It was not their fault that the airport numbers had not grown, particularly with Covid. It was no one's fault, it was Covid. Their numbers had not grown in the same way as those in Cork or Dublin, particularly Dublin. Part of what we need to look at now in aviation policy is whether we can do some rebalancing and take some of the pressure off Dublin Airport and give Shannon a lift.

In the middle of the Covid crisis, we paid for a whole new scanning system in Shannon. Passengers going through Shannon do not have to take anything out of their bag, no little plastic bag for liquids, laptops and everything - none of that. They go straight the way through because it is state of the art. I met the head of security in Shannon Airport and he was telling me about how it is working. It works like a dream. People can get in and out in no time. We have to provide better connectivity, bus services immediately. I would love to build rail and we are looking at that. That is one of the first things I said about Shannon Airport. I do not disagree with the Deputy. Better balanced regional development is one of the things we need to do, and not just in aviation, but it is as good an example as any.

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