Kenny Jacobs had to be careful not to overdo it at the Oasis reunion concert in Croke Park on Saturday, August 16th, revisiting part of the soundtrack of his college years in the mid-1990s.
As chief executive of State-owned airport operator DAA, the 51-year-old had to be up early the next morning for a radio interview as Dublin Airport prepared for the busiest day in its 85-year history, with 132,000 passengers passing through its two terminals.
The former Ryanair executive told Newstalk’s Anton Savage the cultural shift from having worked for years as chief marketing officer at DAA’s biggest airline customer – and one of its sharpest critics – was less than many people thought.
“It’s about on-time performance, it’s about operational efficiency, it’s about the daily grind of getting people through an airport, to a boarding gate, on a plane and away,” he said. “Coming from an airline to an airport has an advantage because you know what those airlines are looking for.”
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With Jacobs almost three years into a role at the operator of Dublin and Cork airports, Savage wondered if he was still enjoying it.
“I’m loving it,” he replied, before signing off saying that he planned to go to the second Oasis show that evening.
Mutual agreement
A little over four weeks’ later, Jacobs, on Tuesday, agreed that he would leave his post at DAA – for which he received almost €375,000 in remuneration last year – by mutual agreement, according to sources. An official announcement could come as soon as Friday, after a routine board meeting in Cork.
It followed a rift that had developed between Jacobs and the wider board, chaired by investment banker Basil Geoghegan, in recent months as his management style became the focus of intense scrutiny by fellow directors.
[ DAA’s board has got itself in a right twistOpens in new window ]
He will receive an exit package of close to €1 million, subject to agreement by Minister for Transport Darragh O’Brien and Minister for Public Expenditure Jack Chambers. He is set to remain in his position for the final months of the year, with one of the sources putting this down to the need for “limited disruption” as planning for 2026 continues.
The size of the package has already drawn opposition outrage. “At any time, this would be an insult to ordinary people,” said Sinn Féin spokeswoman on public expenditure, Mairéad Farrell TD. “However, in the context of a raging cost-of-living crisis, which the Government has no plans to address in Budget 2026, it is totally unacceptable.”
O’Brien said on Thursday morning that he had not yet received a proposal for Jacobs’s exit. “My personal experience in dealing with Kenny, I found him very good. He was very committed and remains very committed,” he told reporters in Brussels in advance of a meeting of EU environment ministers. “I’m not going to say anything more than that because it is a sensitive time and these matters are being worked through.”
The Irish Times reported on Wednesday evening last week of the serious board tensions – rumoured for months – that had emerged, and how it had been brought to the attention of senior Government figures, stoking concerns that it could lead to distractions and disruption at a demanding time.
The DAA currently faces planning challenges on a number of fronts at Dublin Airport as it seeks to advance a complex, €2.4 billion infrastructure plan, ease limits on night flights and navigate litigation over a 32 million annual passenger cap.
A spokeswoman was clear that evening, before the report was published: “Kenny Jacobs is and remains the DAA CEO. We cannot comment on board matters, which are confidential, however, robust discussions can and do occur which is the sign of a functioning board.”
[ Minister has not yet received formal proposal for DAA chief exit packageOpens in new window ]
It was subsequently confirmed by multiple sources that Jacobs had been the subject of two protected disclosure complaints relating to what were described as dignity in the workplace matters, which had been examined by an outside party, senior counsel Mark Connaughton. However, his final report, given to the board in early June, did not uphold the complaints.
Connaughton concluded that there was no reliable evidence to substantiate the complaints and that he could not uphold allegations of wrongdoing. One amounted to “unresolved personal grievances”, the Business Post reported over the weekend.
Jacobs was said to have been furious over the board’s handling of the whole protected disclosures process and the potential effect on his reputation.
Meanwhile, sources said the episode prompted the board to re-evaluate his management style.
Tensions escalated over the summer, leading to a full-blown crisis that resulted in both sides retaining lawyers (Jacobs engaged Cian Beecher of Arthur Cox and the board used McCann FitzGerald) and industrial relations veteran Kieran Mulvey being called in at the start of this month to act as mediator.
“To be fair to Kenny, he shook things up and was not afraid to take on outside parties to try and push for progress at DAA,” said a source, adding that the board was supportive of this drive. “But there were times when delicacy was required to get things done. That was often more difficult.”
The executive has been described variously as “direct”, “brash”, “combative”, and a “micromanager”.
Some of Kenny’s fans have pointed out in recent weeks that he merely brought private-sector rigour to a State-owned body with operations in 13 countries and almost 4,200 full-time equivalent employees at the end of last year. Others noted, however, that each of DAA’s other three CEOs since it was set up 20 years ago to replace Aer Rianta – Declan Collier, Kevin Toland and Dalton Philips – were plucked from the private sector. None, however, came from an organisation quite like Ryanair.
The operational and financial key performance indicators (KPIs) of Kenny’s period in charge have been exceptional.
While Dalton Philips’s final months at DAA are remembered by many for the chaotic post-Covid scenes of snaking queues and thousands of passengers missing flights at Dublin Airport in the early summer of 2022, Jacobs is widely credited with tackling congestion issues and improving amenities.
To be fair, DAA – which had let 1,000 workers go in Dublin and Cork during the onset of the pandemic – had already hired hundreds of workers and dramatically shortened queue times before Jacobs took on the top job.
An average of about 90 per cent of passengers got through security in Dublin in less than 30 minutes for 2022 as a whole, according to DAA’s annual report for that year. It also avoided imposing limits on flight number or passengers during the summer period, unlike a number of UK and continental European airports.
Still, in Jacobs’s first year on the job, DAA got 97 per cent of passengers through security in under 20 minutes.
He also oversaw the roll-out of new and improved food and drink options in both terminals in Dublin that year, the addition of more than 400 seats for waiting passengers, and doubling of free wifi speeds. Taxi permits and active bus routes also rose.
The focus on the end customer may strike observers as being at odds with the no-frills reputation of Ryanair, where he led the marketing team between late 2013 and mid-2020.
Early on during his time at Ryanair – following stints with Procter & Gamble’s pharmaceutical business, management consultancy Accenture, German cash-and-carry giant Metro, price comparison company MoneySuperMarket and Tesco UK – Jacobs launched its Always Getting Better programme to improve services beyond its core low-fare strategy.
DAA – whose ARI unit runs duty free shops in 27 airports across 13 countries around the world, and whose DAA International business has management and advisory contracts at three Saudi Arabian airports and owns 20 per cent of Düsseldorf Airport in Germany – saw its revenues breach the €1 billion mark for the first time in Jacobs’s first year.
Turnover rose 9 per cent last year to top €1.1 million, enabling it to pay a record €68 million dividend to the State, more than double the payment made on earnings for 2023.
“The finances have improved materially. And while you can put a lot of that down to a rise in travel following the pandemic, it was also driven by efforts of Kenny and the management team below him,” said Joe Gill, a director of corporate advisory at Goodbody Stockbrokers and co-author of a major industry report published earlier this year, called A Pathfinder for Irish Aviation.
While sources say the current Minister for Transport, Darragh O’Brien, was a fan of Jacobs, his self-confessed willingness to stick his “elbows out” and “take-no-shit” attitude when it came to dealing with its local authority, Fingal County Council, grated with some senior Department of Transport officials.
Jacobs warned last summer that the Republic stood to lose about €500 million a year in tourism spend as a 32 million passenger cap at Dublin Airport. His comments in an interview with the Financial Times that the “outdated cap” was “another black mark on foreign direct investment in Ireland” is said to have particularly irritated officials. The cap was imposed in 2007 as a condition of allowing the second terminal to go ahead, amid traffic congestion concerns – before a number of road upgrades, including the completion of a third lane on the M50.
DAA submitted a proposal to Fingal to raise the cap to 40 million passengers as part of its wider €2.4 billion infrastructure application – a document that runs to 7,000 pages and includes projects such as building extra piers at both airport terminals, a tunnel under its crosswind runway, a transport centre inclusive of the future MetroLink station, and additional car parking facilities.
However, relations between the airport operator and the council – often strained over the decades – have turned particularly sour since application went in. A filing for an interim increase to 36 million passengers was ruled by planners as invalid in January due to detail on the site notice. It was immediately resubmitted, but remains in limbo.
Aviation noise regulators inside the council separately sought DAA information for a noise assessment on the infrastructure plan in March last year, but DAA has yet to respond. However, DAA says it was awaiting a related decision by An Coimisiún Pleanála that came in July. When the decision issued, DAA promised it would work to provide the relevant information “as quickly as possible” so the council could get on with approving the application.
Private correspondence between the two sides has, at times, been even more tetchy. The council’s head of communications, Gerry McDermott, asked his counterpart in DAA, Sarah Ryan, in January that the airport group stop “publicly lampooning” the local authority.
“It would be much better if the public image is one of stakeholders working in partnership for the good of the country and its people rather than being at loggerheads and lashing each other in the media,” he wrote, according to correspondence released to journalist Ken Foxe, of TheStory.ie, under freedom of information laws.
DAA was hit with an enforcement notice by Fingal County Council in June after Dublin Airport last year breached the 32 million passenger cap. It gave DAA a two-year period to comply with the passenger capacity conditions, even as the restrictions were effectively paused by the High Court since April pending a European Court of Justice ruling on an aspect of the case.
The airline operator’s board ultimately decided it had no option but to apply for a judicial review of the enforcement notice, as failure to comply with the council’s order would have amounted to a criminal offence with no right of appeal. DAA sees passenger numbers reaching 36.3 million this year.
Over the weekend, however, the Minister said he will finally send a memo to Cabinet next month to begin the process of drafting legislation that will remove the restriction – acting on something that was promised “as soon as possible” in the Programme for Government in January.
Still, the level of friction between the council and DAA complicates the approval process for the wider infrastructure application.
Further uncertainty surrounds the outlook for a 105-hectare (260-acre) privately owned land bank between the Dublin Airport runways. The lands are in three lots controlled respectively by brothers Ulick and Des McEvaddy, Seán Fox, and Brendan and Orla O’Donoghue.
In September 2023, the McEvaddys and fellow owners rejected a DAA bid to buy the land for a sum in the region of €75 million. Talks on the proposal went nowhere. The vendors were thinking more of a valuation in the region of €210 million when they put the land out for sale the previous May.
However, it has now emerged that further talks about carving out a 24-hectate (60-acre) plot took place late last year.
Some close observers believe a price tag approaching €1 million per acre was discussed. Asked about the suggested €60 million valuation, a McEvaddy spokesman said: “In November 2024, at the request of DAA, we had talks on the potential purchase of some 60 acres of our land, at near that value.” Yet again, however, no deal materialised. In one account from an informed source, Jacobs and the wider board were completely aligned on DAA’s approach towards the lands.
DAA’s chief people officer, Siobhán Griffin, issued a statement to staff on Thursday morning, following more than a week of sustained media coverage of the rift, promising to update them “in the event of any mutual agreement” being approved.
“We recognise that the recent coverage, speculation and commentary surrounding our CEO and board may be unsettling, not least when family and friends are asking you questions that you can’t answer,” Griffin said.
The breakdown in relations between Kenny and the wider board is seen as being particularly awkward for Geoghegan, who presided over the CEO’s appointment and hailed his “leadership, expertise and experience” at the time.
[ DAA chairman: ‘I would like us to take the airport off the front page’Opens in new window ]
It will place more pressure on the chairman has he leads the search for a new CEO. The process will be complicated by the fact that Geoghegan only has nine months to run in his own role. Indeed, only one of DAA’s 11 non-executive board members currently has tenure beyond the next 12 months.
While some worker representatives and ministerial appointees could have their terms extended, Department of Transport officials, led by secretary general Ken Spratt, will have a major near-term opportunity to influence the complexion of the board. While semistate boards are responsible for CEO selections, they usually seek the informal imprimatur of relevant ministers.
The whole episode raises questions about what kind of culture DAA will end up with and the future strategy it adopts with its local authority. Some sources say it could herald a reset in relations between the airport group and the council.
“But will we end up with a future CEO that is more risk averse and keen to play it down the middle? There’s a huge incentive for someone to play it safe and not upset anyone,” said Gill. “But is that good for the aviation sector – or the country? I’m not so sure.”
