Realising Shannon’s potential

Mr Cawley, who is less flamboyant than his immediate superior but still very blunt, spoke to The Clare Champion last Thursday, after launching the new Shannon-Alicante service with Rose Hynes, Shannon Airport Authority chairperson.

When it was put to him that in 2012 there were concerns the DAA would use its influence to prevent Shannon dropping its prices post-separation, Mr Cawley said those fears were groundless. “Well they have [reduced costs]. It’s happened. Dublin and Shannon are somewhat in competition but not really. Clearly what you can’t have is Dublin and Shannon at the same price.”

He said forcing Shannon to charge the same prices as Dublin, which was the case until the start of this year, was “off the wall. Madness.”

“It’d be like saying that Annacotty Rovers or Ennis United could go into the Champions League and survive. That’s how unrealistic it is. That’ll tell you what the Dublin guys thought about Shannon. They didn’t give a damn. Couldn’t care less.”

Mr Cawley was complimentary about Ms Hynes and said there are possibilities for increasing services from Shannon. “She’s [Rose Hynes] talking the right language, she’s talking about competition, about efficiencies, she’s coming from the commercial world herself. They’re looking to do the business. I’m not going to go into the details of our discussions with them but I’d be very hopeful and it’s in their hand.”

Ryanair had 1.85 million passengers at Shannon in 2008 but this year, it expects the figure will be around 485,000. However, Mr Cawley says this figure can rise if it follows the example of other similar sized airports.

“The first thing to say is Shannon is not Dublin, it’s not London. It’s more like Leeds Bradford, that size of an airport, more like Nantes in France, more like Girona or Pisa or somewhere like that. When we started flying to Pisa first, they had a million and a half passengers. Now they have 4.5 million. It’s very solid, one of the most profitable airports in Italy.”

He says Ryanair can share information with Shannon. “Rose Hynes and the board there have only taken over, she knows what she has to do. We can share templates with her from elsewhere and show her what they’re doing. Airports with somewhere between one and three million passengers, they’re the places to be benchmarking themselves against and they can get passengers in and charge for car parking. Frankfurt Hahn for example, has 11,000 car-parking spaces. Can you imagine if you were getting 11,000 times, say, €10 every day? You’d cover an awful lot of your expenses that way. There are only three million passengers at Frankfurt Hahn. You can make a lot of money from car parking, a lot from selling cups of coffee.”

Shannon needs to focus on traffic from Britain and continental Europe, he feels, much as was done when it reached record levels of traffic in the second half of the last decade.

“The biggest market for Shannon is on its doorstep, in Britain, that’s the first point. The second biggest market numerically is in Europe and the third biggest market is the US, just talking about numbers of people. The Americans stay longer and they spend a bit more as a result but the reality is that they’re not going to drop what they’re doing next weekend and come to the West of Ireland because there’s a cheap fare but people in London will and people in Frankfurt will. That’s where Shannon is particularly short of connections at the moment. If you look back to what we had six years ago when we had 1.8m passengers, that’s where all the connections were, into continental Europe, into places like Bristol, Liverpool, Manchester, Edinburgh, the whole lot, and with big aircraft, not with small aircraft with which they may have some services at the moment.”

As is almost always the case with Ryanair representatives, he was very critical of the State’s approach to aviation, saying it’s only rival for the position of being the worst in Europe comes from Britain.

“You judge the success of an aviation policy on whether there’s growth or not and this country has gone through five years of decline and they’ve used the economy as an excuse and it’s bullsh*t. They should be leading the economy instead of waiting it to turn,” he added.