Originally Posted by
22/04
I think Irish airports must be funded differently. Otherwise how would Kerry for example, survive?
There are one or two state funding streams for Irish regional airports.
For example, the Irish government earlier this year announced €5m in capital funding for Knock, €400k for Kerry, and more for other Irish regional airports, totalling €17m. The government is reportedly also providing €12m in operational expenditure support for the regional airports in 2023 (I would include a link but PPRUNE does not allow me to do so.)
The other disguised funding stream for regional airports is the PSO programme. Until Ryanair put paid to Kerry's PSO service by launching a commercial (unsubsidised) Dublin-Kerry route, Kerry Airport made a very nice income from the PSO.
The idea of a PSO service is that the government subsidises an airline to fly a route which would not be economic. What is less recognised is that the airport can quietly extract quite a lot of cash from that too.
In the case of the last Kerry PSO contract award a few years ago (2018?) , Kerry Airport published two separate sets of fees and charges, one for ordinary commercial flights and one (much higher) for PSO flights. Now Ryanair won't even pay the normal commercial charge, but in the case of the PSO flights, no-one negotiates with the airport (the PSO airline doesn't care, because it's being reimbursed for whatever it pays, and the government doesn't care, because why rock the boat?). Plus, last time round, the PSO covered the cost of out-of-hours opening of the airport, while Ryanair took the benefit.
This two-tiered charging scheme for PSOs is not unique to Kerry. Donegal was doing something similar. Perhaps it also happens in other countries. It's just a very "convenient" :-) way for government to "quietly" funnel more money to regional airports, over and above publicly declared financial support.