When it comes to the tumultuous fallout from the Dublin Airport passenger cap, it is not just the moneymaking airlines making noise. Nor should sympathies lie solely with cash-strapped members of the diaspora facing “record high” air fares, as Ryanair prophesied, to get home for Christmas.
Writing for this news organisation recently, Eoghan O’Mara Walsh, chief executive of the Irish Tourism Industry Confederation, noted the symbiotic relationship between Ireland’s tourism and aviation sectors, and their mutual importance to economic growth.
“Tourism relies on aviation to bring in visitors and airlines rely on tourism to fill seats,” he said.
And when they arrive, where do they go and how do they get there? In the latest broadside on the passenger cap — which limits numbers to 32 million a year as per an old planning restriction — coach and bus hire companies have echoed this law of unintended consequences.
Fixing on such “ripple effects”, the Coach Tourism and Transport Council of Ireland (CTTC), noted that with Ireland’s ability to attract international visitors now in relative jeopardy, rural economies are “likely to be the worst hit”.
Given the Government’s plans for tourism revenue growth, and the need to spread it across the regions, this clarion call from the coach sector — tourism’s very supply system — should arguably not go unheeded.
CTTC chairman William Martin said coach tourism is a “vital contributor to rural economies, and hard-to-reach destinations in Ireland”.
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“The sector drives footfall to towns and villages that fully depend on visitor spending. The cap is not just about limiting flights; it’s about the livelihoods of thousands of people in tourism and hospitality who rely on a steady influx of international tourists,” he said.
Much too has been made of all the pre-election promises to scrap the cap; a prospect so tantalising to vested interests that Airlines for America, the lobby representing US and Canadian carriers, have since written to James Lawless, the outgoing Minister of State at the Department of Transport, with a not so subtle reminder.
Industry voices are getting louder. “We are deeply frustrated that these constraints risk Ireland’s reputation as a world-class destination,” said Martin, “while putting rural jobs and businesses under immense pressure”.
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