gate 22. Cork city's boundaries haven't changed in 50 years, practically all its suburbs are outside the small city boundaries. To suggest it has only 190,000 people is laughable. The Cork metropolitan area including it's commuter towns is closer to double that. As someone who has lived in both cities, Belfast is larger but not significantly larger and by the way as has been said many times, a lot of Cork passenegers, especially from the county use Shannon for cheap Ryanair flights.
Yes, theres been a long running saga running for years down here about expanding the city boundary. The sagas been ongoing for my entire lifetime anyway. Cork City Corporation want to more than double the size of Cork City but Cork County Council don't want to lose the valuable commercial rates income they receive from the Cork city Industrial estates (the vast majority of Cork City's industrial estates lie outside the city boundary). The real population of Cork city is much higher than the official figures suggest. Douglas for example, a suburb of Cork which lies outside the city boundary has 18,000 inhabitants. Not one of those inhabitants is counted in the official figures for the population of Cork. Cork is not significatly smaller than Belfast, however the hinterlands around Belfast are more heavily populated than the environs of Cork. The reason the figures for the airport are so much lower is that Munster has 4 international airports for 1.2 million people, Ulster has just 3 airports for circa 2 million people, its no surprise that the Belfast airports are carrying more than Cork.