Dublin Airport flights could soar to €1,000 claims Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary

Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary has claimed Christmas flights at Dublin Airport could soar to over €1,000 due to the “insane and stupid” passenger cap.

The airport has a passenger cap of 32 million per year according to planning permission granted by Fingal County Council and came close to exceeding it last year with 31.9 million passengers last year. Daa has applied to the council to increase the cap to 40 million with the approval process still ongoing.

However the firebrand airline chief has called on Transport Minister Eamon Ryan to tell daa to ignore the cap or introduce legislation to bypass the planning process. “If we had a Minister for Transport who was modestly interested in aviation or even modestly interested in economic growth and development – which his own aviation policy is at the heart of – he would fix this,” he told The Pat Kenny Show on Newstalk.

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Mr O’Leary added the “bizarre” thing is Ryanair would “make a fortune” if the cap was not lifted as the price of flights would rocket to €500 each way. He said: “If we’re not allowed to add in those 270,000 extra seats at Christmas, we’ll put them somewhere else – they’ll go to Spain or they’ll go to the UK, they’ll go to Italy.

“But the airfares in and out of Dublin this Christmas will be €1,000 return – they’ll be €500 each way. We’re going back to the old days of flag carrier monopolies.”

In a meeting with Minister Ryan in March of this year, O’Leary said he told him he could grow air traffic in Dublin by a third over the next six years but has yet to hear back from the Green Party leader. “I told him we’ll put another 10 or 15 aircraft into Ireland in Dublin, Cork and Shannon and we’ll create about another 7,000 jobs here in Ireland,” he said.

“We haven’t heard back from him. I mean, he hasn’t even been back to say no.” He continued: “The question I put to Eamon Ryan at our meeting was, ‘how many of these aircraft do you want me to put in Dublin, Cork and Shannon?’

“He’s there giving you a kind of gormless smile, you know? Nothing. I would want to put five aircraft in Dublin next year. I could open about 25 new routes and we could grow traffic by about a million passengers.

“Yet while the Minister for Transport and his Green Minister for Tourism both sit on their hands, smiling gormlessly at us, these aircraft and these routes and these jobs are going to be exported elsewhere to Europe.”

The Ryanair boss also took aim at pilots from rival Aer Lingus who have voted to take strike action over a pay dispute, accusing them of “blackmailing” airlines. He said: “I think what they got from the labour court, about 9.5 per cent, is more than fair,” said Mr O’Leary. “It’s certainly ahead of inflation which is two or 3 per cent, and most of the people making the noise here are the senior captains on €250,000 a year.

“I think it’s indefensible. These guys are blackmailing airlines and the public over strikes during the summer. They’ve already been offered a 9.5 percent pay increase. If they were baggage handlers you’d have more sympathy, but this is just industrial blackmail.”

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