The current infrastructure planning in Ireland, particularly regarding airport capacity, is outdated and uncoordinated, Dublin airport CEO Kenny Jacobs has said.
He says the current restriction on the number of passnegers at Dublin airport at 32m reflects ongoing confusion over ownership and accountability regarding transport issues in Ireland, and that discussions tend to focus on who is responsible rather than finding effective solutions.
In an interview with Travel Extra he said: This issue now goes beyond transportation and goes beyond aviation. This is not an Ireland problem. Planning moves too slowly; infrastructure thinking is not joined up. Things like the cap are a really good example of something that was designed 16 years ago when you had traffic congestion. Dublin had 15pc of passengers coming via bus; now you’ve got 35pc of passengers coming via bus. We don’t have traffic congestion. The cap is out of date. The sooner it goes, the better. We should have applied for planning years ago, not last year. We learn from that, but we’re in uncharted territory and the great loss is that it’s just going to take… as it now stands.
I don’t know what happens next in terms of consequence; that’s a question that people have been asking. I’m very comfortable that we’ve done everything to comply, and even though it goes against our grain, we’ve actively discouraged airlines from expanding at Dublin. We’ve discouraged new airlines from coming here. We’ve taken away incentives and introduced new incentives at Cork. If we didn’t take those actions, instead of going over the limit by 1m, we’d be going over by closer to 2m. So I’m comfortable that we’ve done everything we can.
We’re now in uncharted territory because we’re going over the limit. We can’t control the number of passengers because we don’t run the slot process, and you’ve got DEA saying, Well, we’ve taken all these actions. What more can we do? So it’s now in a place that’s well above my pay grade in terms of deciding what happens next and what the consequences will be.
I think that’s a really good example that this is all a bit of a muddle: who owns what? I think too often in Ireland the debate is on who owns the problem rather than how do we get the problem fixed.
And I don’t know the answer to that because, look, we run two airports here; we run international businesses; we run travel retail. But it’s a bit of a muddle in terms of who owns what, and that’s really what Ireland needs to get better at: clear ownership and clear leadership when it comes to planning and infrastructure. Because we’re now in this muddle that is set to continue until we get approval to operate to a higher number of passengers.
