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Dublin Airport operator DAA says it will continue to “refine and adapt” its security operations after passengers were forced to queue outside the terminal building early on Saturday morning.
Images and footage posted on social media before 5am showed a very large queue of passengers outside Terminal 1 while large queues were also photographed inside the terminal.
The queues came ahead of a large wave of early morning flights with many passengers travelling abroad at the start of the school Easter holidays.
We are currently filtering passengers into the terminal buildings in an orderly manner to join check in & security queues which are moving & we thank passengers for their cooperation & patience at this extremely busy time of the morning in advance of the first wave of departures.
— Dublin Airport (@DublinAirport) April 9, 2022
T1 Dublin Airport pic.twitter.com/4i3S1QRzUK
— mark keating (@markkeating2) April 9, 2022
DAA said with passengers arriving as advised three and a half hours before departure time it had to stagger the flow of passengers into the terminal building.
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It said this was “well managed by airport police with assistance from An Garda Siochana”. The operator of the airport thanked passengers for their co-operation and patience “at this extremely busy time of the morning in advance of the first wave of departures”.
In a statement on Saturday DAA said that queues for check-in, bag drop and security “moved well” on Saturday morning in advance of the first wave of departures.
The DAA indicated there was an average queue time of an hour before 6am today.
The authority said as the number of passengers travelling through Dublin Airport this Easter will increase over the coming days they will continue to “refine and adapt” its security screening operation, to ensure that all passengers can pass through security in plenty of time to make their flights.
The DAA acknowledged that the “shortage of security screening staff” is the main reason for the current issues.
“While there have been no constraints on recruitment - more than 100 new security staff have already been recruited so far this year - DAA is re-doubling its efforts to more staff. This week, DAA invited about 250 candidates for interview, and almost 100 successfully progressed through the interview stage.
Bringing recruits into the operation had been delayed recently by the requirement for enhanced background checks for aviation workers which came into effect on January 1st this year. Thankfully, however, this logjam is now easing.”
Security
DAA said it is also exploring other options to increase security staff numbers in the short-term, including identifying former security screeners still employed by DAA, but now in different roles in the company, and contacting staff currently on career breaks, to ascertain their interest in reverting to security duties in the short term.
“The company is (also) temporarily re-assigning a number of Cork-based security staff to Dublin Airport in a manner that will assist the operation at Dublin, without compromising the product offering in Cork. daa is also offering overtime to screening staff to encourage them to take up additional hours to help alleviate the issue.
Army
Ryanair group chief executive Michael O’Leary called for the army personnel to be called in to help security staff over Easter. .
Speaking on Countrywide on RTÉ on Saturday he said in the coming weeks there was the “big annual Haj of the Easter school holidays with lots of families coming through the airport”.
Mr O’Leary said delays at Dublin Airport will continue for the rest of the month and next month as staff shortages continue to cause havoc amid increased passenger numbers over the Easter break.
He said that Dublin Airport have “held their hands up” in relation to the recruitment crisis and that efforts are being made to remedy the situation.
“It is a bit more difficult to recruit airport staff at the moment beause they have to specific security clearance. They are short about two hundred security staff and we think they will be able to recruit those over the next two months.
But April and May is going to continue to be problematic. We think the solution is to bring in some Army personnel, particular at weekends as they can do the pat downs and the cold throughs and free up those people to open up all the X ray machines.
“In Terminal 1 they have about fifteen x ray machines. Currently, they are only staffing about eight to ten of those machines. Particularly for the next three weekends we really need the help of the army.”
He said that the army has enormous expertise on security and that they are “the best in Europe” in terms of what they do.
“We think that would be the way to solve the problem. “
He told presenter Damien O’Reilly that Irish people are starting to travel in numbers which are similar and even surpass rates from pre the pandemic.
“We carried 11.2 million passengers in March (of this year) compared to 10.9 in March of 2019. People have been locked up for two years. There is a huge hunger there to travel both for business and for leisure.