RYANAIR has pledged to breathe new life into Shannon Airport over the next five years by bringing in one million new passengers, provided the Dublin Airport Authority extends its “growth incentive scheme” to the low-cost carrier.
The airline’s chief executive Michael O’Leary has told The Clare People that his offer to address Shannon’s flagged fortunes would be the start of a process where passenger numbers could again touch nearly two million passengers a year, which was the case as recently as two years ago before Ryanair started scaling back its operations on foot of higher costs.
“A million passengers in Shannon would create about a thousand jobs there and a visitor spend of close to € 100 million annually,” Mr O’Leary revealed. “We will deliver that if the same traffic growth incentive discount that the DAA have recently given Aer Lingus at Dublin Airport is given to Ryanair.
“It’s a net € 4 per passenger that the DAA are paying Aer Lingus. If they put a similar growth incentive scheme in place in Shannon that we will pay the existing charges that have gone up by 33 per cent on the base traffic of 300,000 passengers, but on the increase of one million new passengers the DAA would pay us a net € 4 per departing passenger,” added Mr O’Leary.
At the peak of Ryanair’s involvement in Shannon, the airline operated 53 routes from Shannon, but began to scale back its operations in March 2009 after the Government introduced the € 10 travel tax.
Then last November the airline cut back to 300,000 passengers annually when passenger fees were increased by 33 per cent, but Mr O’Leary has told The Clare People that the air- port’s recovery can be kick-started
“We are operating year round three routes at Shannon. We would have to take that back up to 25 routes. We now only have one aircraft based at Shannon – we would have to go back up to four, relaunch a lot of the routes we had to close and open some more routes.
“I see no reason why we couldn’t grow our traffic back up to 1.8 to 1.9 million passengers annually if two things happen – one thing if the travel tax is removed and two the DAA give his growth incentive scheme.
“After a 37% traffic decline in January, what has Shannon, the DAA or the Irish Government got to lose, apart from more passengers, more visitors and more jobs in the MidWest region.
“Ryanair has given the DAA until March 5 to accept our one million passenger growth offer,” continued Mr O’Leary “and since Declan Collier and the DAA have no other plans for traffic growth at Shannon, this time we hope they’ll see the sense of accepting Ryanair’s offer and putting Shannon Airport back on a growth trajectory, rather than continuing with the DAA’s failed higher fees/traffic collapse policy,” he concluded.