YOU HAVE to admire Michael O’Leary. The man is all heart. Yesterday, he gallantly offered to rescue Shannon airport from oblivion, holding out the prospect of an extra one million passengers for what he called the “biggest failure among Europe’s airports”.
He painted a grim picture: almost no flights and very few passengers. “The place is now dying on its feet,” he said. All Shannon has to do in return is to pay Ryanair the equivalent of about €4 per departing passenger over the estimated 300,000 travellers the airline brings through the airport.
“Shannon is in freefall, it’s facing traffic collapse, and I think Ryanair is the obvious and only way that this traffic collapse at Shannon can be reversed,” O’Leary said. “But the fact that the offer comes from Ryanair probably means it will be rejected again anyway. We can but try, and at least someone is coming forward with a plan to grow traffic.”
You’d think the Dublin Airport Authority, which has responsibility for Shannon, would snatch his hand off for such an opportunity. After all, O’Leary says it offers a similar deal to Aer Lingus in Dublin Airport. Though the authority denies this, O’Leary says his proposal would cost it only €2 million a year and the discounts would decrease gradually over the five years of the agreement.
And you can’t deny that Shannon could do with a boost. Airport authority figures show traffic has fallen sharply this year, and is nearing a level last seen in the early 1990s. Only 92,000 passengers passed through Shannon last month, and it has seen a 52 per cent fall-off in traffic since its peak in 2006.
The authority blames Ryanair for the collapse in traffic in the past year, something the airline isn’t denying. It admits that it has cut passenger capacity since April last year, when its deal with Shannon as a low-cost base ended. It further cut back in November, when passenger charges at Shannon were raised.