One in four airport staff seeks redundancy as crisis deepens

ALMOST one in four staff at Dublin and Cork airports has applied for a voluntary redundancy programme, it has been revealed.

Both airports are massively overstaffed for the number of passengers travelling through them now and are losing a shocking €1million a day.

A collapse in interna tional travel because of the coronavirus has seen arrivals into the country drop from 1.94 million in June last year to just 57,000 this year – a massive fall of 96%.

DAA, which owns and runs both airports, had asked for volunteers in a bid to reduce costs and 870 staff have come forward. It comes as Aer Lingus is also looking at possible compulsory redundancies to cut its costs. Staff had been asked to consider three options: a voluntary severance package, a career break or reduced hours and remaining full-time.

A DAA spokesman said yesterday: ‘We’re losing €1million a day, we’re in a very difficult financial position.

‘If you take Dublin for example, we had 33 million passengers last year. We were staffed with an expectation that passenger numbers would increase again this year so we currently have a business where we have far more people than the business we’re going to have either this year or next year or the year after. So we’ve no choice but to reduce costs very significantly.’

Travel industry expert Eoghan Corry said the strong take-up from staff was not a surprise.

‘There’s a great sense of doom about aviation, so people who are there are saying “let’s get our backsides out of this because there might be a second round or a third round and we won’t get such a good deal”.

DAA chief executive Dalton Philips previously said the State-owned firm had lost around €1million a day since St Patrick’s Day - which he described as ‘enormous’. He said at the time he believes it will take up to three years for passenger numbers to recover.