Alan Farrell (Dublin Fingal, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The difficulty many of us have, which we have articulated here or at meetings of the committee over recent weeks, is that whatever about the redundancies offered in 2020, the DAA knew by 2021 that it was looking at an uptake in numbers. Therefore, it was completely illogical for it to have 1,400 passengers miss flights in May 2022 as a result of its inaction over the previous 12 months. It just does not make any sense. Representatives of the DAA told us at one point during the course of last week or the week before that it did not know how many passengers were going to show up. I do not like using foul language and am not going to, but that is BS and they know it. For them to tell us they did not know how many passengers were going to show up when they had seats and slots booked and airlines expanding their routes just makes no sense. Therefore, there is more to this than we are being told or the DAA representatives let on before the committee.

I commend the Deputies, including my constituency colleague, for the questions put because this matter is really troublesome. I said two weeks ago in this Chamber that I would have serious concerns about the operations at Dublin Airport if the response I have mentioned was the response to a crisis and if 1,400 people missed out on their flights because of a failure to do the very basic thing, which is airport operations.

See this speech in context