Sleepless nights a plenty this week at Aer Rianta, whose £1 billion (€1.27 billion) investment programme was kiboshed by the airports regulator, Bill Prasifka.

The State company had grand plans that none of its customers wanted. It failed to convince Mr Prasifka of the plan's merits and he ruled that only £272 million of the programme was justified.

In the process, Mr Prasifka lowered landing charges at Dublin Airport and lined up decreases from next year at Cork and Shannon - after a rise this year.

Fine Gael's public enterprise spokesman, Jim Higgins, was quick to criticise Mr Prasifka's determination, an hour before it was published, in a press release.

The statement was a touch previous, based as it was on a draft determination published in June, which Mr Prasifka had altered radically.

By way of an aside, it is very unlikely that Mr Higgins would have been as swift to respond had he actually read the determination, which ran to more than 530 pages.

This included pages of lengthy mathematical formulae worthy of Pythagoras himself. The Margin was baffled but Aer Rianta seemed to get the message.