Offaly County Council has applied for Government funding to the tune of €2.5m to fund a study of a possible international airport at Tubber, located between Kilbeggan and Athlone. The site is just a few hundred metres from an intersection on the M6 motorway, which is good news and bad news. It’s nice to be near the motorway but unfortunately it leads to Dublin Airport and the AA route-planner says the trip takes 69 minutes.

There were nine airports offering passenger flights in the Republic at the peak of the bubble, now reduced to six with the closure of Galway and Sligo and the discontinuation two years ago of flights at Waterford, which has not yet been formally closed.

Necessity

A small country with a decent national road network does not need very many airports. They are expensive to build and to operate.

Airlines are not keen to serve small airports, diluting their business at bigger ones nearby and have abandoned services at several small airports around Europe in recent years despite offers of zero landing fees.

Passengers prefer the choice of destinations and frequencies at the bigger locations and Dublin attracts 10% of its patrons from Munster, another 10% from Northern Ireland and almost as great a share from Connacht.

Long-established airports at Aldergrove in Belfast and at Cork and Shannon are resigned to the passenger leakage to Dublin; it is a fact of economic geography. If anybody seriously believes that there is a market opening for yet another airport in Ireland, North or Republic of, they should consult the people who pushed for airports in Galway, Sligo and Waterford. Or they could talk to management at Carrickfinn, Derry, Knock, Kerry, even Cork and Shannon, which struggle to generate revenue adequate to meet operating and capital costs.

The decision to build so many airports around Ireland to coincide with the construction of the motorway network was, to be kind, not based on transport realities. The project promoters are seeking the €2.5m grant from the Rural Regeneration and Development Fund and see the facility as an alternative to Dublin airport.

For my sins I am a non-executive director of DAA, the airport company which owns Dublin and Cork, and belongs to the Government. Dublin will handle about 31 million passengers this year, versus about seven million in all five of its competitors in the Republic put together.

To build an airport to rival Dublin in scale (the Tubber runway would be 3,500m, longer than the new north runway at Dublin due to commence construction shortly) would cost somewhere between €3bn and €4bn.

Public opinion

The local paper is not impressed with the proposal, reporting that “in a recent poll on the Offaly Express, 86% of voters approved of the idea for an airport in Offaly. Almost 1,000 readers cast their vote between Thursday evening and Friday evening, and the straw poll revealed overwhelming support for the outlandish plan”.

The project promoters should be disappointed that a mere 86% of Faithful County readers support the scheme, since no costs would fall on them or on Offaly County Council if the Government grant is forthcoming.

The council’s total spending in 2019 will be about €56m, so the council cannot plead inability to finance the study through a reordering of priorities. But there is no need to think about priorities if central government is generous enough to write the cheque. Would the council scrap €2.5m of roadworks, or of housing provision, to fund a study of such an unlikely project? There is a pattern emerging of Government unwillingness to simply say no to projects of this type, opting instead to fund feasibility studies.

This is the course chosen with the proposed extension of the Western Rail route northwards from Athenry. There is no more need to do a study on this proposal than there is on the airport at Tubber. The Government must already know that it does not stack up given the experience with the Ennis to Athenry section of the Limerick-Galway line which cost over €100m and carries very few passengers, since the service is slower and less frequent than the unsubsidised bus operations on the same routing.

The offer of a feasibility study which, if conducted honestly, can deliver only one obvious result, is a waste of taxpayers’ money as well as a racket for consultants.

Where the project, as in the Tubber case, has local project promoters, what does it say about their seriousness if they require 100% grant aid for a study costing a tiny fraction of the likely bill for the overall project? There should be a mechanism to deter frivolous applications for free feasibility studies.

The best mechanism would be a refusal by central Government to finance them at all.

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