Ryanair is restoring all pre-Covid flights from Cork Airport from next summer, while it will add services to Birmingham and Edinburgh from December.
The airline confirmed it planned to restore its two-aircraft base at Cork after striking a deal on charges with State airport company DAA, which is extending airline incentives there to October 2022.
However, the airline warned that a Government failure to fund a similar extension at Dublin Airport would leave the capital with fewer than two-thirds of its pre-pandemic services next summer.
Ryanair's move at Cork means that from December it will begin flying to destinations in Spain, including Alicante and Malaga, Poznan and Gdansk in Poland, several London airports and Liverpool for winter.
Ryanair is adding services to Birmingham and Edinburgh, previously flown by Aer Lingus Regional carrier Stobart Air, which folded in June, bringing its winter routes to 12.
Next summer the carrier will fly 20 routes to Britain, France, Italy, Poland, Portugal and Spain, including Carcassonne, Faro, Lanzarote, Milan Bergamo and Tenerife.
Eddie Wilson, chief executive of Ryanair DAC, the group's biggest subsidiary, calculated that reopening the Cork base represented a $200 million (€170m) investment that would secure 60 jobs.
He predicted that Cork, Kerry, Knock and Shannon airports would have pre-pandemic traffic restored from next summer.
Incentives
Mr Wilson added that Ryanair capacity at Dublin would be 35 per cent below pre-Covid levels next summer as the Government was only funding DAA’s traffic recovery incentives for the airport to June instead of October.
"We call on Eamon Ryan, the Minister for Transport, to urgently confirm the extension to the current DAA scheme until October 2022, similar to the scheme at Cork Airport."
Niall McCarthy, managing director, Cork Airport, said Ryanair’s announcement was good news for jobs in “aviation, tourism and hospitality, and the rebound of our economy in 2022”.
