THE GOVERNMENT has been urged to remove the €250,000 cap on the salary of Dublin Airport Authority’s chief executive.
Chairman-designate of the authority Pádraig Ó Ríordáin told an Oireachtas committee yesterday a loosening of the salary cap would enable it to secure the best candidate possible to replace Declan Collier, who is due to leave the company by the end of March.
The Government has determined the chief executive’s role at the authority should come with a starting salary of €219,871, rising to €250,000 over a period of time.
While acknowledging that this was a matter of Government policy, Mr Ó Ríordáin said: “I think having too low a pay is going to inhibit Dublin airport very significantly. What we are doing is competing with airports across Europe.”
Mr Ó Ríordáin, a senior partner with law firm Arthur Cox, cited the fact that comparable airports in Birmingham, Manchester and Dusseldorf pay their CEOs significantly more than the Government’s pay cap would allow, and yet these airports did not hold the same strategic importance to their countries that Dublin, Cork and Shannon have for Ireland.
“These are gateways to our country. If we want to compete as a country we need to get the best person we can.”
Mr Ó Ríordáin said he would “pay a bit more” to the new chief executive than the band set out by the Government. Mr Collier’s salary in 2010 was €308,500.
Last June Mr Collier hit the headlines after it was revealed he had been awarded a performance-related bonus of €106,100 by the board of the airport authority for 2010. He eventually agreed to waive this bonus under pressure from Minister for Transport Leo Varadkar.
Mr Ó Ríordáin said it would “probably” be nine months before a new CEO was in place. The role was advertised last week.
“That’s pretty much the time frame I have in mind,” Mr Ó Ríordáin said in reply to questions from Fianna Fáil’s transport spokesman Timmy Dooley.
Mr Ó Ríordáin also told the committee that passenger traffic at Dublin, Cork and Shannon airports increased “slightly” in 2011.
In 2010, 22.6 million passengers used the three airports.
This reversed declines of recent years and comes against a backdrop of an “almost total collapse” in domestic air traffic, which has declined by 1.3 million since 2007 as a result of certain public service obligation routes being scrapped by the Government and improvements in road and rail connections changing travel patterns.
