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DAA paid out more than €56m in redundancy or severance to staff, figures show

Details of these and other payments set out by Department of Transport in answer to parliamentary questions

State owned DAA, which operates Dublin and Cork airports, paid more than €56 million in exit payments from 2019 to 2022. Photograph: Alan Betson

Martin Wall
Fri Mar 8 2024 - 17:13

State-owned airport operator DAA paid out more than €56 million in recent years as part of redundancy and exit deals for 166 staff, new figures show.

The details were revealed as part of answers to a series of parliamentary questions this week.

The figures given by Minister for Transport Eamon Ryan to Kildare TD Catherine Murphy of the Social Democrats show that in 2019 and 2020, a total of 99 staff left DAA under voluntary severance and voluntary early retirement schemes with an overall cost of €31.71 million. This was an average payment of more than €320,000.

In 2021, just more than €20 million was paid out by DAA in respect of voluntary severance and voluntary early retirement schemes to 54 personnel. This equated to an average of just over €370,000.

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In 2022, DAA paid €4.7 million in voluntary severance and early retirement packages to 13 individuals – an average of just over €361,500.

DAA manages Dublin Airport and Cork Airport and operates duty-free shops via its Aer Rianta subsidiary.

Mr Ryan said that Dublin Port Company had provided redundancy/exit packages to seven individuals between 2019 and 2023 with a collective value of €1.759 million. This equated to more than €251,000 per person on average.

In addition, he said the Shannon Airport Group had paid out €498,000 in total to two staff last year as part of a voluntary severance arrangement.

Details provided on foot of parliamentary questions this week also reveal that a senior market adviser in an overseas role with Enterprise Ireland received a payment of €316,882.

The Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment said this represented “an end of service payment in line with local legislative requirements, with no discretionary element”. The individual concerned had worked for the agency for 35 years.

In a statement, Ms Murphy said the figures provided by the Department of Transport in respect of the DAA, Shannon and the Dublin Port were “something that merits further scrutiny”.

“All we have are figures, there is no detail. It is important to mention that the Comptroller & Auditor General published a special report on the management of severance payments in public sector bodies in late 2015.

“In the report it is stated that ‘the Department of Finance indicated that severance payments or early retirement terms could be incurred for chief executives of state bodies, within maximum limits and without requiring the approval of the department’. This could be interpreted as a blind-spot in oversight and controls.

“Also, the response from the Minister fails to clarify if any post was vacated due to redundancy, this is particularly relevant given the furore around the VER [redundancy] package to an RTÉ executive that was then backfilled. I have sought clarity on the information provided to separate payments by amount and category.”

In a statement DAA said: “In 2020, during the Covid-19 crisis, passenger numbers at Dublin and Cork airports declined by 78 per cent from 35.5 million in 2019 to 7.9 million. At one point, the company was losing almost €1 million per day and had virtually no passengers and an urgent requirement to re-scale the business.

“In total, 759 employees left the company under a voluntary severance scheme (VSS), almost a third of the workforce. As reported in our 2020 annual report the total cost of the VSS was €99 million.”

Martin Wall

Martin Wall

Martin Wall is the former Washington Correspondent of The Irish Times. He was previously industry correspondent

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