Dublin Airport plans to hire 235 more security officers as it grapples with the fallout significant delays for passengers last weekend, but says this will take until the end of summer.
Dalton Philips, chief executive of airport owner DAA, told the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Transport that the company planned to boost frontline staff numbers to 800 to cope with a post-Covid pandemic surge in passengers.
Dublin Airport hopes to have 702 security staff by the end of the month, but Mr Philips predicted it would take until the end of the summer to reach 800. Some 104 recruits are training, with a further 64 “in a pipeline”, he added.
“We are 60 security officers behind where we need to be, you are operating on very fine margins,” he said, responding to questions from TDs and senators after delays last Sunday caused 1,000 passengers to miss flights.
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Mr Philips said DAA did consider rehiring some of the 260 security staff who were among the 1,000 of its Irish-based workers who took voluntary redundancy during the pandemic. However, he noted that this could create tax problems for those concerned.
A DAA spokesman later said there were “no plans” to rehire those who left under voluntary severance.
“Staff who took voluntary severance cannot be rehired, due to the terms of the package that was offered and accepted.”
The DAA told Fianna Fáil senator Gerry Horkan that its voluntary severance scheme cost €100 million. Committee members said this came to more than €100,000 per staff member – but the DAA argued it would not be appropriate to go into detail.
The Department of Transport and the Department of Public Expenditure approved the scheme’s terms and conditions. A spokeswoman for Minister for Transport Eamon Ryan confirmed this but added: “The number of staff targeted under the voluntary severance scheme is a matter for the DAA.”
Mr Philips told Fianna Fáil TD James O’Connor that DAA believed that Dublin Airport would be able to cope with likely 2022 traffic with 75 per cent of its pre-Covid workforce.
“We took all the industry analysts’ data and we worked through that to try predict what the traffic levels would be,” he said. “We were widely wrong. From March it took off at a level we never expected.”
He pointed out that most analysts forecast that air travel would not recover to 2019 levels until 2024. Dublin Airport’s traffic is now about 90 per cent of what it was three years ago.
It emerged at the hearing that a cyber attack lay behind the mix-up that led the airport to roster 17 new security recruits on Sunday who had not been certified to begin work. DAA uses a time-management system provided by software developer Cronos, whose systems were attacked in January.
Maurice Hennessy, the company’s chief information and security operations officer, explained that as a consequence some work has to be done manually.
Mr Philips told the committee that DAA had since addressed the “anomaly” that caused the rostering error.
The problem, combined with the absence of 20 security staff meant that Dublin Airport had 37 fewer frontline officers than expected on Sunday, when 274 should have been working, forcing it to close six lanes, three in each terminal.
This meant 1,200 fewer people per hour got through security than normal. Queues grew to the point where at 10.30am airport staff told waiting passengers that they were likely to miss flights due for take off before noon.
Sinn Féin TD Darren O’Rourke, the party’s transport spokesman, said it remained the case that there was a “significant shortage of staff to meet demand, and that looks likely to be the case at least until the end of June”.
