SHANNON AIRPORT is “dying on its feet” and will not survive unless Government aviation policy is reversed, Ryanair chief executive Michael O’Leary claimed yesterday.
Mr O’Leary issued the warning in Limerick where he announced a further 21 per cent cut in the airline’s flights and traffic from Shannon this winter.
The cuts will see the closure of Ryanair’s Shannon-Paris route from November 1st and a reduction in the frequency of the Shannon-Gatwick and Shannon-Stansted services.
At its height in 2008, Ryanair employed 300 staff at Shannon where it had based six aircraft and served 53 routes.
Two years later, following a gradual reduction in its services there, Ryanair has just one aircraft at the midwest airport and employs 45 people. After the Paris route is closed in November, it will serve just six destinations from Shannon.
According to Mr O’Leary the latest cuts in Ryanair services will result in 100 job losses for the wider Shannon area.
He also said the latest reduction in services from Shannon would see Ryanair passenger numbers return to 2003 levels of 400,000, down from a high of two million.
The cuts, he said, were in response to last week’s decision by the airport to impose a further 33 per cent increase in passenger fees despite a decline in its traffic by more than one million passengers to a projected 1.6 million for this year.
The “triple whammy” of Shannon’s high costs, its refusal to extend Ryanair’s five-year base deal and the imposition of the Government’s €10 travel tax had devastated traffic, tourism and jobs at Shannon airport and in the midwest region, he added.
“Shannon is in worse than terminal decline. Shannon is dead if these policies are not reversed immediately,” he said.
“Shannon is dying on its feet. We’ve gone from 53 routes to six in the space of two years. These are mobile assets, they go elsewhere,” he added.
In a statement Limerick Chamber said Ryanair’s latest cuts at Shannon were “a serious blow” to the region. President of the chamber Kieran MacSweeney said the airport was a critical piece of infrastructure for the west coast of Ireland.
Mayor of Clare Cllr Christy Curtin called on the chairman of the Shannon Airport Authority to appear before Clare County Council to clarify the authority’s role regarding the management of the facility. “The need to establish an autonomous Shannon airport has long been debated but there is also an urgent requirement to define the exact nature of the role played by the existing Shannon Airport Authority,” he said.
Shannon airport said it very much regretted the announcement by Ryanair. It said in a statement it had anticipated that Ryanair would announce a limited reduction in flights, but the cutting of the Paris-Beauvais route was surprising as it is had been a strong performer with a load factor of 89 per cent in August.
The statement described the recent increase in passenger airport charges at Shannon as modest, saying it was necessary to address the airport’s loss-making operations, and had aligned Shannon’s charges with peer airports such as Cork, Knock, Southampton and Edinburgh.
The Government travel tax “provides no revenue support to Shannon airport”, it said.