Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary has said he believes that the Irish Aviation Authority does not have the power to reduce flight slots at Dublin Airport in summer 2025 as proposed.
He says that Ryanair and other airlines believe the IAA’s statement about the DAA repurchasing is misleading, as they claim the Coordination Committee dismissed requests to reduce seats for summer.
The airlines anticipate blocking extra flight requests for the upcoming summer and are considering seeking a high court injunction based on the draft determination, which may only apply for summer 2025.
The IAA is under pressure to remove approximately one million seats from the summer 2025 schedules, although the airlines doubt their legal power to enforce such reductions.
Ryanair criticised Transport Minister Eamon Ryan for not taking action against the IAA’s proposal to cut one million seats from Dublin Airport’s summer 2025 schedule, which could lead to fewer flights and higher fares for families and visitors.
Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary emphasized that the reduction in traffic would negatively impact Irish tourism and called for immediate ministerial action to facilitate additional flights for holiday travel and events.
The airline urged the Minister to issue a Direction Letter to the IAA to approve extra slots for winter 2024 and summer 2025 while the DAA seeks to eliminate the outdated 2007 traffic cap limiting passenger traffic.
The airline has requested intervention from An Taoiseach Simon Harris, advocating for a Ministerial Direction to support Dublin Airport’s growth and challenge the traffic cap, while criticising Ryan’s perceived inaction and incompetence in addressing transport issues.
Mr O’Leary told Travel Extra: Ryanair, Aer Lingus and the other airlines have received strong legal advice that the IAA has no means of reducing slots at Dublin Airport. They don’t have a legal mechanism for doing it. Their statement is a bit disingenuous; it says that the DAA repurchased the actual Coordination Committee of the airlines told them to [expletive]off for not reducing any seats next summer. We accept that they will block us from getting extra flights, which is why all of the routine extras we get this winter won’t be allowed. But they have no means of actually forcing us to reduce slots next summer.
We think that the draft determination gives us the grounds to look for or get a kind of high court injunction against them. Now, I think the injunction will only be effective for summer 2025; it won’t rescue this winter.
The IAA wants to take one million seats, or about a million passengers, out f the summer schedules for 2025. We don’t think they have the legal power to do it, but nevertheless, they’re under pressure. The only way to solve this in the near or short term is to get Eamon Ryan to issue a directive, which we presently won’t, which is why we’ve drafted the direction letter for him and sent it into him.
At least if we can force or get some kind of injunction against the IAA acting, then at least that means there won’t be any reduction. But we still have no means of growing for the next year or two unless or until the Transport Minister issues a direction to the IAA.
We think that Eamon Ryan’s line about interference in the planning process is completely bogus. The planning process can continue side by side; it doesn’t matter if traffic grows between now and when their final decision is made. They’ve already broken the planning cap anyway this year; they did 33 million passengers. So the planning thing is just a mirage.
Eamon Ryan won’t take any action. We had the Junior Minister out yesterday warbling on about just sending them all to Shannon instead; it’s only 240km away, so they should be fine. Incompetence is what we’re dealing with here at the moment. Like, it’s remarkable. I think if we had any other party in transport and tourism, they would issue the directive. But Ryan just won’t move, won’t budge. Sadly, he’s not running for election again anyway, so I don’t think he gives a shite one way or the other; he’ll just keep ducking it.
I think we’ll be off to the courts, and it may well be that that’s how we get this sorted or at least force the IAA to accept that they cannot act, in which case at least there won’t be any cuts. But we still may not be able to grow any traffic for two or three years until the planning issue gets resolved.
Nobody has the wherewithal to sort it out. But that doesn’t solve the problem; it doesn’t solve the issue about delivering additional growth in summer 2025.
Now we’ve got all the slots for the existing historical ones—but they haven’t given us the slot for the historical extras, which is the Lapland flights. Now, you know, the Lapland flights and the Christmas flights. We also haven’t got them for the rugby internationals in the spring or Cheltenham. We’re losing out on traffic and growth, and you know, there’s going to be a lot of cases now in the run-up to Christmas. Leinster charters are the obvious ones, the Ireland charters are the next ones, and then Christmas extras. After that, it’ll be the rugby internationals.
Dublin is going to be down two million passengers in summer of 24, again summer 25, and probably summer 26. It’s losing about two million passengers a year, a million from us and probably a million from all the others. We planned to base three more aircraft in Dublin this summer, which would have delivered another million passengers. So what it means is we didn’t grow by a million passengers this year. The IAA are purportedly going to write to the airline saying, “Please everybody reduce your flights by a million seats next summer,” and we’ll all write back and go [expletive]off.
I think the best outcome here is that we will get some sort of injunction or a reference to Europe, because ultimately this will be subject to European rules. That would take it off for two or three years, but that reference would be suspensory. And if that’s the case, then we believe that would be the mechanism by which we can continue. We would require the IAA to issue the additional slots so we just continue to grow.
The political solution here is the election, can we get this onto the manifesto of Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael. We accept that Eamon Ryan will not do anything; he’ll just hide and duck. But if we can get the traffic cap on the manifestos of, say, Fianna Fàil in the run-up to the election, then an incoming Minister for Transport would issue the direction straight away, and that would fix summer 2025. It’ll still come too late for Christmas 2024.
