Ryanair to close Shannon base for the winter

THERE has been terrible news for Shannon this morning with Ryanair announcing it will close its base at the Clare airport for the winter.

With transatlantic closed down already and the Shannon-Heathrow route also suspended, Shannon will now have just eight scheduled passenger flights per week.

Ryanair’s Cork base will also be shut, along with other cutbacks throughout the continent.

In a statement on Thursday morning, Michael O’Leary blamed Government mismanagement of the pandemic across the continent. “While we deeply regret these winter schedule cuts they have been forced upon us by Government mismanagement of EU air travel. Our focus continues to be on maintaining as large a schedule as we can sensibly operate to keep our aircraft our pilots and our cabin crew current and employed while minimising job losses. It is inevitable given the scale of these cutbacks, that we will be implementing more unpaid leave and job sharing this winter in these bases where we have agreed reduced working time and pay, but this is a better short term outcome than mass job losses. There will regrettably be more redundancies at those small number of cabin crew bases wehere we have still not secured agreement on working time and pay cuts, which is the only alternative.”

Owen Ryan