On Monday Tánaiste Leo Varadkar reminded the launch of Fine Gaels Dublin Bay South byelection campaign that it was against the law to leave the State for non-essential reasons. The following day he received a letter from Aer Lingus informing him of plans to close its Shannon Airport base, with the potential loss of 126 jobs, and of likely cuts in Cork and Dublin.
The same day, Tuesday, the Cabinet was due to discuss plans to reopen air travel after 14 months of tough Covid-19 restrictions, but postponed this to next week. That agenda will include debate on mandatory hotel quarantine, a restriction applying to among others, visitors from EU neighbours, Belgium, France and Italy.
Willie Walsh, Irish chief executive and director of the International Air Transport Association, on Thursday dubbed quarantine repressive and dangerous in an address to politicians. Walsh, founder and former chief executive of International Airlines Group (IAG), owner of Aer Lingus and British Airways, observed that his native countrys attitude to travel throughout the Covid-19 crisis amazed him.
He told Joint Oireachtas Committee on Transport and Communications Networks that he himself had not travelled to the Republic since February last year, a consequence of policies that he argued were based on the mistaken notion that everyone flying in here is infected with the virus.
For months, even with job losses in airlines and airports hovering at the 4,000 mark, the Government has managed to avoid much public criticism of its tough stance against travel, or of its seeming lack of a plan to reverse that position as vaccines reopen the rest of the world.
But events this week threw the issue into sharp focus. A few hours before Varadkar suggested that heading for a Mediterranean beach might be a crime, Ryanair published results showing it lost 815 million in the 12 months to the end of March. However, its chief executive, Michael OLeary was bullish about the months ahead. He predicted that the Irish giant could carry four million passengers next month.
If we get to four million in June, it could be anything from seven to nine million in July, he informed US and European brokers analysts. The upper end of that forecast would be 61 per cent of the 14.8 million people that Ryanair flew in July 2019, but twice what it carried in the same month in 2020, when the airline relaunched after being grounded for three months.
OLeary said summer bookings from the UK, Germany, the Benelux countries, Scandinavia and eastern Europe were beginning to accelerate as vaccinations took hold and people looked beyond lingering restrictions and concerns. Families are going to be moving in very large volumes to the beaches of southern Europe, he declared.
He doesnt believe it will stop there. Assuming that a vaccine-resistant Covid variant does not emerge, then OLeary calculates that Ryanairs passenger numbers will recover through the second half of the year to around 90 per cent of pre-virus levels. From that point, they could return to normal during the airlines next financial year, which ends on March 31st, 2023.
OLeary told his audience of Wall Street, City of London and European analysts that there was only one black spot in all this: Ryanairs home nation. He added that the carrier had moved aircraft from Dublin and wont be moving them back this year, as the Republic was the only place where airports were not looking to add capacity.
He dismissed Irish restrictions, including hotel quarantine, as stupid and ineffective, arguing that they were easily circumvented, but still gave the impression that the State was closed to visitors. The airline boss reserved much of his ire for Eamon Ryan, Minister for Transport, whom he said had left proposals from the industry for restarting travel gathering dust on his desk for 10 months.
Even by OLearys normally outspoken standards, his frustration with Government was obvious. Despite emphasising that the Republic was a small part of Ryanairs business, he took several opportunities to fire broadsides at its travel policy during the conference call with analysts.