Dublin Airport hits half of 2019 capacity

DAA chairman Basil Geoghegan says Dublin Airport and Cork Airport have as much to offer airlines and passengers now as before the pandemic

Dublin Airport

John Mulligan Twitter Email

October 21 2021 02:30 AM

Dublin Airport is now operating at about half of its pre-Covid capacity on some days even as carriers such as Aer Lingus move assets to the UK, according to DAA chairman Basil Geoghegan.

Mr Geoghegan told the joint Oireachtas Transport Committee yesterday that Dublin Airport and Cork Airport have as much to offer airlines and passengers now as they did before the pandemic.

“We think we’ll be as competitive as we ever were,” he said.

Aer Lingus operated its first direct service between Manchester and Barbados yesterday.

It will also operate a service from Manchester to New York.

"Our airline customers are incredibly mobile with their aircraft,” Mr Geoghegan told the committee.

“You saw Aer Lingus moving to Manchester because they believe they can fly full planes out of there.”

Mr Geoghegan, who is being appointed to a second term as DAA chairman, has railed against what he says are passenger charges that are too low at Dublin Airport, especially given the impact of the pandemic on passenger numbers.

Dublin Airport’s passenger charges are regulated by the Commission for Aviation Regulation.

“We haven’t really seen evidence that if you reduce passenger charges that you immediately boost airline activity,” said Mr Geoghegan.

He told the committee that Dublin Airport has found itself “facing into the crisis with a fundamentally flawed pricing structure, resulting in airport charges that were disproportionally low when compared with its European peers”.

“We had airport charges at around the €9.50 mark [per passenger, before the pandemic],” he told the committee.

“That has been reduced to somewhere around €7.75,” he said. “That’s a significant amount of millions of euro that effectively is a value transfer for the taxpayer of Ireland to the airlines. We would like to see charges calculated on the basis of the current reality as opposed to the very optimistic outlook in 2019.”