Dublin Airport queue system working smoothly but situation ‘delicate’, DAA says

The situation at Dublin Airport is “delicate” and management are continuing to hire security staff as quickly as they can in order to avoid cancelling flights in the coming weeks, the CEO of Dublin Airport Authority has said.

Dalton Philips said while 200 extra security officers have been recruited to date, they still need to hire another hundred.

“We are in a very delicate situation because when you are down the required numbers of officers you need like last weekend you can have a very rapid build up of queues. We are in a very tight situation,” Mr Philips told RTÉ's News at One.

There were no major delays at the airport on Friday with the measures put in place to alleviate earlier problems working smoothly and most passengers making it from the door of Terminal 1 through security in less than 30 minutes.

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The busiest period of the morning was between 5am and 6am but, according to Kevin Cullinane, head of communication at the DAA, the authority which runs the airport, people were being processed in no more than 45 minutes even when the passenger numbers were high.

Coverings have been installed outside the terminals to accommodate hundreds of passengers with those who had bags to check in directed to one entrance and those with carry on luggage only directed to another.

Mr Cullinane told The Irish Times that the authority would continue monitoring and tweaking the new measures put in place to expedite the flow of passengers through the airport over the course of the weekend and he expressed cautious optimism that the chaotic scenes from last weekend would not be repeated over the bank holiday period.

Most passengers coming through the airport for the first wave of departures on what is going to be the busiest weekend since the start of the pandemic more than two years ago, were adhering to the rules and arriving in a window of no more than two-and-a-half hours for short haul flights.

Everyone who spoke to The Irish Times on Friday morning expressed enormous relief that the queues they had feared would mar the start of their journey had not materialised. Inside the terminal building there was an air of relative calm with the only queues at the bag drop areas for airlines including Air Canada, British Airways and Aer France.

Early morning departures on Friday have been going well and queuing times were in the order of 10 minutes at Terminal 1 and 15 minutes at Terminal 2 shortly after 8am.

With some 328 departures from the airport scheduled for Friday, the day started well with queues moving well for the peak 6am-7am period when 36 flights left the airport, without significant issues. The next peak is between 1pm and 2pm when 21 flights will take off, followed by the an evening peak of 25 flights taking off between 7pm and 8pm.

The airport authority has made changes to passenger approaches to Terminal 1, with the departure road now closed to all traffic. This has created space for a marquee which will be used to protect passengers from the rain, should queues need to extend outside the terminal building. A new drop off area has been created in front of the Atrium building — which links the coach and bus park to Terminal 1.

All car park shuttle busses will now stop in the area close to Terminal two, with passengers for Terminal 1 walking to the entrance to the Atrium Building which will be used to access the departures area.

Taoiseach Micheál Martin said Ireland’s reputation “can recover” from any damage caused by the chaos last weekend, adding what happened was “not acceptable”.

but stopped short of saying there should be consequences for the management of the airport’s operator DAA if there is a repeat of the delays for passengers.

Speaking in Dublin at the annual congress of Alde, Fianna Fáil’s political grouping in Europe, Mr Martin stopped short of saying there should be consequences for the management of the airport’s operator DAA if there is a repeat of the delays for passengers.

He said there will be “change happening anyway” in terms of the role of chief executive, a reference to Philip Dalton’s impending departure from the job to go to Greencore.

Mr Martin said “serious questions” need to be asked on what happened and “serious lessons need to be learned.”

He added: “The focus right now has to be on correcting and making sure that Dublin Airport performs to previous standards in respect of both the number and volume ... of [passengers] that it can accommodate on an ongoing basis and also ... the treatment of its workers as well, in terms of the various pay issues.”