‘Hurling final travel exposes lack of Cork-Dublin flights’, TD says

Attempts to organise charter flights to Dublin for last Sunday’s All-Ireland hurling final were met with no response from airlines, Cork North Central TD Thomas Gould told a Dáil committee last week as he highlighted the lack of direct air links between Cork and Dublin, as well as Belfast.

Speaking at a meeting last week of the joint Oireachtas committee on transport, the Sinn Féin TD pointed to “a serious lack of public transport” between Cork and Dublin as people struggled to travel to Croke Park for Sunday’s All-Ireland hurling final. Before the committee were Irish Aviation Authority chief executive Declan Fitzpatrick and members of his senior management team.

“We’ve a very successful airport in Cork, but we’ve no direct flights between Cork and Dublin and Cork and Belfast and, to me, that’s a huge weakness in connectivity, especially for people who are travelling here, either tourists or business,” Mr Gould said, pointing to the high concentration of international companies in Cork.

Mr Gould said he had contacted DAA (Dublin Airport Authority) about putting on flights from Dublin to Cork for Sunday’s match, because of the difficulties fans were experiencing in getting to Dublin.

“We’ve a serious lack of public transport, the trains are at a max, and we’ve only got one additional bus at a time that we could transport people to Dublin.

“What they said to me, they confirmed to me they had space for charter flights, if we could get charter flights to Dublin.

“I contacted a number of airlines to see if they’d be willing to do it, but none of them came back to me.”

He expressed his belief that there should be direct air links between Cork and Dublin and Belfast.

“I also believe that where there are major international events that it should be possible to organise charter flights to carry people to those events,” he said.

Mr Fitzpatrick said that there was only one public-service obligation route in the country — between Dublin and Donegal — and that the decision had been taken at government level to end other public-service obligation routes, such as to Kerry and Cork.

“If you look across Europe at those kinds of routes, there has been a trend over the years that shorter routes are dropping,” he said, pointing to the improvement in roads and in other infrastructure.7

“As a trend across Europe, you will see less and less of routes like Cork to Belfast or Cork to Dublin,” Mr Fitzpatrick said.