Varadkar: Scrap the airport passenger cap

TAOISEACH Leo Varadkar said a 32million annual passenger cap on the country’s main airport should be scrapped.

Speaking in South Korea while on a trade mission this week, Mr Varadkar said Dublin Airport is the ‘gateway to the country’, and that capping the number of passengers ‘creates a difficulty’.

Dublin Operator, DAA, recorded 25million passengers in the first nine months of 2023 and is approaching its annual cap of 32million.

The cap was imposed in planning regulations when the airport’s second terminal was approved.

Mr Varadkar said he knows from his time as Minister for Transport that airlines ‘will fly where they want to’.

He added: ‘It’s not the case that you could tell somebody who might be thinking of starting a direct flight from Ireland to India or Ireland to Brazil go to a different airport. Instead, they will still go to different countries. There’s a real risk that if we cap flights, we’ll lose routes or we won’t get new routes that we would otherwise have got. They [airlines] won’t go to a different airport in Ireland, they’ll go to a different country.’

The Taoiseach said that while he appreciated the cap has to go through a planning process, it should now be removed.

‘You can do so much by ship, but aviation is the way we get on and off the island, both for trade and for personal travel and capping that, I think, creates a difficulty.

‘I don’t think it makes sense in terms of tourism, in terms of our economy, in terms of people-topeople contacts around the world at a time when we’re looking to create new additional direct routes to Ireland.

‘In the real world where airlines decide where they want to fly the risk is we lose routes from Ireland to other airports and we don’t get direct routes that we would like to Asia to India to Africa to Latin America.’