Kenny Jacobs of Dublin airport and Donal Moriarty of Aer Lingus warned that the Dublin airport passenger cap may not be solved until 2026 in a panel discussion at the Irish Travel Industry Confederation conference in Dublin.
Both of the speakers dismissed as unrealistic suggestions by Junior transport minister James Lawless and tourism minister Catherine Martin that flights be moved to Shannon and Cork to cope with the restrictions at Dublin airport
Mr Jacobs said: the whole notion that capping Dublin will make them move to the regions is simplistic; it doesn’t reflect how the airlines work. It also doesn’t reflect how EU open skies and EU regulation work, so that’s naive. Support the regions; encourage the airlines to go to the regions. That’s what we’re doing with Cork; that’s what everybody should be doing. But capping Dublin, all you’re doing is immediately costing jobs to the Irish economy. You’re immediately hurting Irish tourism; you’re immediately hurting the Irish economy, and you’re giving Irish aviation and Irish tourism a bad look because it’s creating this cloud of uncertainty around the place. We should have applied for planning years ago; I think in about 2018 we should have looked to remove the cap as soon as T2 opens in Dublin. But everybody needs to look in the mirror.
This has just moved too slowly, and we’ve all ended up with this problem. It’s creating damage to the economy this year already, and it will next year because there’s a million passengers coming out next year; that is now a fact. I think we should all work together to make sure that that damage doesn’t get repeated in 2026.
We love Cork and Shannon airports, but they are point-to-point demand markets, whereas Dublin is a hub. So just to explain how that works, Dublin is the hub, and the way the connecting flow traffic works in Dublin is that many passengers on a transatlantic flight arriving into Dublin are not leaving the airport at all but are connecting on another flight to a European destination. Similarly, with short haul passengers coming into Dublin, they’re not leaving the airport; many of them are connecting onwards onto long-haul services. So it’s that aggregate of demand of point-to-point and connecting traffic that makes the route exist in the first place. So it’s not possible to just simply take that route and put it in a regional airport like Cork or Shannon. As much as we love them, to depict that as a solution is incorrect; it’s wishful thinking, and it’s not viable from an airline economics perspective or a passenger demand perspective.
that’s the reality, and that’s the way aviation works. We should focus on getting the cap lifted. Getting the CED for us comes down to planning. We will continue to work on planning through the infrastructure application we submitted last year. We’re working on an operational works application that we would submit to Fingal, which doesn’t require us to build anything, but it would remove the 32m cap at Dublin for a period of time while we’re at the risk of losing connectivity and losing jobs. That’s what we want to protect, so that’s sort of as a more temporary measure.
The Irish Travel Industry Confederation conference in Dublin attracted 300 leading tourism professionals to the Dublin Royal convention centre to hear the major issues of concern to the industry being discussed.
