Ryanair fears Dublin Airport could be short of security staff this Christmas, according to its chief executive Michael O’Leary.
Security delays at Ireland’s biggest airport early last summer caused passengers to miss flights over one weekend, prompting apologies from its owner, State company DAA.
Mr O’Leary told the Oireachtas joint committee on transport on Wednesday that Ryanair had voiced concerns about the same issue with the DAA recently.
“We think that there may be a security staffing shortage there this Christmas,” he said. Mr O’Leary added that the DAA should be hiring now for next year.
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“You’re not talking about an awful lot of staff, if they move early enough, they should not have these issues,” he said.
DAA group head of communications Kevin Cullinane said the company continued to hire workers for numerous roles at Dublin Airport and lured 800 likely applicants to a recent jobs fair.
He added that its campaign was aimed at generating a strong pipeline of potential candidates for the available posts.
Mr Cullinane maintained that this would enable DAA “to meet both the current and future needs of the business”.
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Mr O’Leary acknowledged that former DAA chief executive Dalton Philips, and his colleagues, succeeded in turning the situation around last summer.
Earlier, he told the committee that the Government spent 70 per cent of €140 million in environmental taxes paid by air travellers on Bus Éireann’s school transport services.
“And some of it was spent in 2020 when schools were closed due to Covid,” Mr O’Leary added.
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He stressed that the airline was not against school buses, but noted that the Government was meant to spend the cash on the environment.
Mr O’Leary added that Ryanair believed airlines should pay environmental taxes, once these were levied fairly across all passengers.
He told TDs and Senators that the EU exempts long-haul journeys from environmental taxes, even though they account for 54 per cent of its air travel emissions and just 6 per cent of passengers.
“So the richest passengers — the Americans, the Chinese, the Russians — are flying to and from Europe and not paying anything,” he said.
Mr O’Leary warned that this unfairly disadvantaged the Republic, as it drove up the cost of flying, potentially damaging vital air links to Europe.
He called on Minister for Transport Eamon Ryan to lobby Europe to apply environmental taxes “fairly to all flights”.
Ryanair estimates that applying these taxes to long-haul passengers would cut the cost of short-haul flights by about €2 or €2.50.
“People say it’s only €2,” said Mr O’Leary. “But if customers didn’t mind, we’d have taken it off them years ago, they’re incredibly price sensitive, they mind 10 cent.”
He said the savings from extending environmental taxes to long-haul flights would allow Ryanair to accelerate growth at Irish airports, including Cork and Shannon.
Chief executive of Ryanair DAC Eddie Wilson, the biggest airline within the group, confirmed that it was in talks with Cork Airport on maintaining three aircraft there and with Shannon on the possibility of expanding operations.
Mr Wilson argued that Dublin Airport’s growth did not mean that the regional centres lost out.
Instead, he argued that both airports should keep charges down to attract business from Ryanair and other carriers and market themselves as destinations in their own right.
Mr O’Leary said that he wished the incoming DAA chief executive, former Ryanair marketing boss Kenny Jacobs, well. He added that Mr Jacobs’s first task should be to shelve plans for a €200 million tunnel under one of the airport’s taxiways.
