I meant just to write about the airports but I feel partly responsible for this thread degenerating into a political squabble about the border since I was the person who listed all the airports North and South. I did so, not to make a political point, but to make a reality point. No airport on this island can operate in isolation from the others. Huge numbers from the North fly from Dublin, half of Derry's catchment area is in Donegal etc.
The border, without its passport control, etc, which now really exists only on maps and tax/benefit regimes, is irrelevant to flyers. Indeed, if you fly from Belfast to Cork or from Derry to Dublin you will not encounter passport control whereas you would frequently have a passport check while flying to and from Britain showing that this situation here is much more complex than just "Northern Ireland is part of the UK" or "The North is part of Ireland".
Indeed the reply that questioned whether Belfast and Derry airports should be included in the discussion of Irish airports misses a point: Edinburgh and Glasgow, for example, are undeniably in the UK but are also Scottish airports. Similiarly Belfast and Derry can be in the UK and also in the Irish airports forum.
I would not have listed a discussion of UK airports without including Derry and Belfast either. Personally I have always considered flights from Belfast and Derry whether to Britain or to other parts of Ireland as domestic. This does put Derry and Belfast in a special category as I do not regard flights from Dublin and Cork to Britain as domestic, but of course Northern Ireland is unique position with regard to Ireland and with regard to the UK.
Sorry for that, now on to my real point:
With the new €10 travel tax, a small slice of this revenue will easily fund PSO routes many times over!!
While I do not buy Ryanair's dubious statistics about how much this costs the Irish tourism industry, I do nevertheless agree with MOL that it should go and is a bad for the country. (Same for the UK APD). Further I think the PSOs are unsustainable in the current financial climate but I do agree that their removal would be devastating to certain airports. However the route development fund that ran several years ago in Northern Ireland was a huge success taking Northern Ireland from one international route ( see above comment about domestic routes
) to I've lost count. In the long term a route development fund would be much more useful to any airport than a PSO.
The airport tax should go and so should the PSOs but they should be replaced by a route development fund. One mistake that should avoid being repeated is that Derry and Belfast City were not ready (due to their runway lengths) to make use of the route development fund and so the fund in its almost entirety was spent at Belfast International. A similar mistake south of the border would not assist the airports that currently rely on the PSOs. Any route development fund should therefore be divided and ring fenced for each airport and if an airport is not ready then the funds should be held for it until it is.