As if DAA, the operator of Dublin and Cork airports, did not have enough on its plate, the board has fallen out with chief executive Kenny Jacobs in what seems certain to end in an expensive and disruptive parting of the ways.
On his appointment less that three years ago, DAA chairman Basil Geoghegan hailed the “leadership, expertise and experience” of Jacobs, which he said would be “vital” as the airports group and its board “embrace the growth opportunities that lie ahead”.
Not any more. He is clearly no longer seen as the man to lead the DAA on the path to those growth opportunities – in particular, increasing passenger numbers at Dublin Airport by removing passenger and flight caps and building airport infrastructure to accommodate those numbers.
Some have sympathy with the embattled chief executive. Neither the 32-million cap on passenger numbers and the ban on night-time flights from the airport’s new north runway that have been the defining issues of his time are ones that emerged on his watch.
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Both relate to the original planning approval for the runway in 2007. And as the airport got busier (save for the pandemic lockdown restrictions), it has long been clear that they would present problems for the DAA. Yet the airport operator did little or nothing to address them until the runway went live in summer 2022.
Jacobs star appears to have waned more because of his management style than any failure to deliver on strategy. The Department of Transport, Fingal County Council, local residents and DAA staff have all become tediously familiar with the now-famous “sharp elbows” he referred to in a combative interview in the Sunday Independent earlier this year.
Quite what Geoghegan and his board thought they were getting in hiring someone who had been at Michael O’Leary’s elbow for close to a decade is for them to say but, to use Jacobs’s own words, a “take-no-s**t” attitude would seem to have been a given. If that isn’t seen as a good fit for the challenges now, it wasn’t then.
Now a board – all bar one of whom have less than a year to serve in their current term – appear to be back at square one, with all the same challenges in place, relations with key stakeholders tense and a new chief executive to recruit, while figuring out how to meet what looks likely to be a hefty bill to compensate Jacobs for the four-plus years left on his contract.
