There were nine airports offering regularly scheduled service in the Republic during the bubble years.

Since Saturday last, there have been just five. Dublin is offering around 70 departures per day, with much chopping and changing of schedules and poor seat occupancy on many services. There would be around 250 daily departures from Dublin in a normal peak season, mostly full.

There have been no scheduled services from Waterford since 2016

There are now just four or five departures per day from Cork and Shannon, one from Knock and one from Kerry. The cessation of operations by Stobart Air, the regional franchisee of Aer Lingus, brings to zero the number of daily departures from Carrickfinn in Donegal.

There have been no scheduled services from Waterford since 2016, although the airport remains nominally open. Sligo has been kept open to service search-and-rescue helicopters, while Galway has been closed. There had been three airports in the Republic until the 1980s at Dublin, Cork and Shannon.

The six regional airports, clockwise around the coast at Waterford, Kerry, Galway, Knock, Sligo and Donegal, were established with State capital money and ongoing subvention to operating costs, flight subsidies or both. Last Monday, there were just two flight departures from these six locations in aggregate.

Neither Cork nor Shannon covered fully their operating and capital replacement costs in the last normal year of 2019

Of course, COVID-19 is the principal factor, but it should be noted that three airports (Galway, Sligo and Waterford) had seen the withdrawal of scheduled service, despite subsidies, well before COVID-19 struck.

Neither Cork nor Shannon covered fully their operating and capital replacement costs in the last normal year of 2019. Dublin was the only airport to do so and picked up the tab for Cork, while Shannon has, in recent years, been subsidised out of the rent roll of the former Shannon Free Airport Development Company.

In Northern Ireland, the airport at Eglington near Derry makes regular annual losses, with the tab in this case picked up by the local authority. There are two viable airports in nearby Belfast, with the closest, at Aldergrove, no more than a one-hour drive from Eglington.

Politicians are not noted for admitting mistakes, but it should now be clear that they over-provided this small island with airports.

It is not a devilish plot that Dublin airport dominates Irish airport traffic, it is the expected outcome given the economic geography of the country

The decisions to spend both capital and current subsidy on regional airports coincided with major improvements to the interurban road network, undermining whatever attractions they may have offered for internal trips, especially to Dublin, on which the new motorways converge. It is not a devilish plot that Dublin airport dominates Irish airport traffic, it is the expected outcome given the economic geography of the country.

Small airports, especially when they operate in the shadow of larger ones with better schedules and easy surface access, invariably struggle financially. Killarney is just 75 minutes from Cork Airport. There are heavy fixed costs and the break-even level of traffic is too hard to achieve. In subventing too many regional airports, Irish politicians are not alone.

Around continental Europe, local mayors have campaigned for small local airports, often located within an hour or two of an alternative which has better facilities, a bigger catchment and is bound to be more popular with airlines and their customers. Southern France for example has a necklace of loss-making follies in a region well served by bigger airports at Nice, Marseilles, Montpellier and Toulouse.

In several European countries, the end of the Cold War saw airforce withdrawals by both NATO and Warsaw Pact countries, happy to hand over the keys to local politicians, many of whom came to regret their enthusiasm. Military airfields tended to choose remote locations and vast expansions of concrete, delivering few passengers and heavy running costs.

The longer travel restrictions remain, the more of the small carriers will go under

Stobart was not the first small European carrier to give up the ghost – the UK’s Flybe was an early pandemic casualty, among others in continental Europe including Sun Express and Norwegian. The legacy state airlines, including long-term lossmaker Alitalia, have been supported by their governments, but the small fry are orphans and many, including both Stobart and Flybe, were in trouble before COVID-19 came along.

The longer travel restrictions remain, the more of the small carriers will go under. Since there were an estimated 100 scheduled carriers operating in Europe pre-COVID-19, they will not necessarily be missed in the smaller aviation market that seems to be in prospect.

More airports will close too. In Britain, Carlisle airport seems likely to follow Plymouth, already closed, and there are question marks around several others. Routes to smaller centres considered marginal before the pandemic will now look untouchable to the airlines which survive.

Local interests in Kerry and Donegal have been quick to demand the restoration of the Stobart Dublin routes and want a new carrier to be found at whatever subsidy level is needed. Would they feel the same if the county council, rather than central government, was paying the bills?