Budget airline Ryanair is to close two of its European services from Shannon Airport in order to open up four new routes.
The low-cost carrier will end services to Stockholm and Hamburg before offering services to the UK, Rome, Murcia on the Spanish Costa Blanca, and Wroclaw in Poland.
A spokesman for the airline blamed a lack of demand for the closure of the two routes. He said they were not pulling in as many passengers as had been expected, but insisted the services had not been losing money.
"There are always going to be some routes that do not work out. We are not going to hang around staring into space while they do not perform," the spokesman said.
The four new routes will start on February 22nd next year and run three times a week. The service to Wroclaw will be the airline's first route between Ireland and Poland, and will bring the total number of Ryanair routes out of Shannon to 19.
Ryanair's chief executive Michael O'Leary said that since the launch of the airline's Shannon base in May, Ryanair traffic at the airport had trebled. "Ryanair has delivered dramatic growth at Shannon airport as promised. This is good news for business and tourism in the mid-west," he said.
"Today's four new routes to England, Poland, Italy and Spain mean that over the next year 1.5 million passengers will use Ryanair's Shannon flights, almost one million of whom will be inbound visitors, sustaining 1,500 jobs in the mid-west."
PA