DAA has a people problem

It’s been a bad week for Dublin Airport and DAA, the State body that runs it. And the fear now is that next week will be even worse as schools close and families head for holiday flights over the June bank holiday weekend.

The problems that saw the DAA’s airport flow management systems collapse are not unique to Dublin but no other major airport appears to have had as much trouble addressing them.

The only bit of good fortune for the departing Dalton Philips and his team was that, once again this weekend, the rain held off as thousands of increasingly agitated passengers snaked through the makeshift outdoor queuing system.

Philips on Monday got the dressing-down he no doubt expected from Ministers, irate at the short and potential long-term damage to Ireland’s reputation and to its critical tourism sector from the Third World conditions travellers experienced as they headed for their flights.

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Among the many questions the DAA has to answer is why, when the State had put in place specific wage support schemes to ensure employers did not have to lose staff who would be critical to business operations once the pandemic ebbed, it chose to let go people with skills it knew it would need when the tide turned.

Even as he prepared to let a third of his workforce depart on generous severance terms in March last year, Philips was talking of the “huge underlying demand for international travel”.

The experience of Irish aviation has been consistently to outperform expectations for growth. It happened in the Celtic Tiger years and again when the economy recovered after the financial crash. And it is happening again. The DAA is already looking to increase passenger charges by more than 70 per cent over the next four years to build up a kitty to invest to prepare the airport for the 20 per cent plus growth in passenger traffic over its pre-Covid peak that the chief executive anticipates as early as 2030.

Airlines were talking up the prospects for recovery as far back as November. Why then was the DAA so slow to start recruiting critical security staff who it knew would require up to 16 weeks’ training – and on much criticised terms that it has since had to adjust simply to attract sufficient recruits?

Whatever way you look at it, it seems the bottom line trumped the people who pay the bills at DAA.