Aer Rianta has vigorously attacked Bord Failte's intervention on the issue of privatisation of the airports. A motion passed at Bord Failte's directors' meeting in November authorised the sending of a letter to Mary O'Rourke's Department of Public Enterprise. The letter said the interests of Irish tourism would be best served by keeping Aer Rianta in State ownership. Bord Failte also urged O'Rourke to give operational autonomy to Shannon and Cork airports.
"We were very disappointed and annoyed when we heard," Flan Clune of Aer Rianta said this week. Basically, he said, Bord Failte was buying into the Ryanair line that the stunted growth of British tourism into Ireland was caused by high landing charges at Dublin Airport. "Bord Failte is just looking for a fig leaf to cover up its own failure in the British market," says Clune.
He is no less scathing about the suggestion that the three Aer Rianta airports might be split up. "Nobody likes to use the word `subsidy', but the fact is that the investment we have put into Shannon and Cork over the past five years was possible only because of the profits made in Dublin. If Shannon was cut loose, Dublin would destroy it." Clune's case is that, for most of the year, transatlantic airlines would prefer to serve only Dublin; they fly to Shannon merely because they have to, under the terms of the current bilateral Ireland-US air agreement.
O'Rourke has proposed that 49 per cent of Aer Rianta should be sold off, but she has been unable to sell this to Cabinet in the face of opposition from Jim McDaid, Charlie McCreevy and Mary Harney. We asked McDaid's department if the Bord Failte directors had breached protocol by writing directly to O'Rourke rather than through the Department of Tourism. "Things are not that tight," said McDaid's spokesman.