There’s something about politicians and airports. Portugal’s southern coast, the Algarve, is a popular destination for Irish tourists and the region’s airport at Faro welcomed a record 7.6m passengers last year, mainly from cooler climes in northern Europe. That makes it twice as busy as Belfast International, or four times busier than Shannon.

Despite a decent volume of business, Faro is rather a mess for passengers: I caught a flight there last week and the airport is playing catch-up. It could be very uncomfortable in the summer peak period. Traffic has exceeded expectations, the place is a bit of a building-site and the work currently under way should clearly have been commenced much earlier. The failure to keep pace with traffic growth at Faro has a depressing explanation – the money has been wasted on a ghost airport just a short spin up the road.

Portugal has three significant airports. The main one in the capital Lisbon is twice the size of Faro and there is a busy airport at the second city Porto in the north with volumes about the same as at Faro.

Portugal is not a large country: its land area is just a little greater than the island of Ireland, it is narrow and longish and has a modern motorway network. One airport in the north, one in the middle and one in the south bring the whole country within easy reach. A child with a ruler would conclude that just three airports, at Porto in the north, Lisbon in the middle and Faro in the south, plus a good north-south motorway, would be enough for Portugal. The three airports, and the motorway, are all in place.

Politicians

Enter the politicians. A little north of Faro in the depressed region of Alentejo is the inland town of Beja, with a population smaller than Waterford. It is host to a full-scale airport with no traffic at all, on which about €50m has been spent between capital cost and operating losses since 2011. A former military base, it is located well away from industry or population.

In Cold War days, the military all over Europe chose remote locations for airfields. They also built big: the Beja runway is longer than the one at Dublin, due to handle 30m passengers this year, and was paid for by the West German airforce, who needed a quiet training base. The local politicians persuaded the Portuguese government to add passenger facilities, as did their counterparts in many parts of Europe. The result is a proliferation of remote ex-military airports, expensive to maintain. Several have closed and more should go, without inconvenience to non-existent passengers. Beja is only a 90-minute drive from Faro and less than two hours from Lisbon.

Spending taxpayers’ money on regional airports within handy driving distance of proper ones is a shocking abuse of the public purse, in Portugal as elsewhere. There is some strange belief that airports can generate traffic independently of the presence of willing passengers. The money wasted at Beja, which included European Union grants supposed to help Portugal, would have gone a long way to financing, years ago, the belated terminal development at Faro, an airport popular with passengers and hence attractive to airlines.

The same political fascination with ghost airport developments has infected neighbouring Spain, where there are numerous similar fiascos. Of the 46 publicly-managed airports in Spain, just eight make a profit and about 20 have negligible numbers of scheduled flights, in some cases none at all.

Two of the regional airports in the Republic of Ireland have closed, Sligo and Galway. Both had several million spent on them through capital grants and operator subsidies. The airport at Waterford has had no scheduled flights for months, although the employees remain on the payroll. In Northern Ireland, the City of Derry airport – easy driving distance from the busy Belfast International –struggles to hold on to a couple of departing flights per day, compared with up to 70 at Belfast. It is kept open with annual subsidies from the local council.

The role of the European Commission in freeing up European air travel has rightly been praised: low-fare airlines, which have made air travel affordable for those on modest incomes, would never have prospered without the Commission’s work in stopping state subsidies to loss-making flag carriers. But the Commission has done a poor job in the case of airports, through wasting EU money on foolish projects and permitting public subsidies to sustain airports which ought to close.

Keeping them open through taxpayer subsidy deprives neighbouring airports of flights to which they are entitled. If white elephants could fly, they would be spoiled for choice.