our branding is poor
This is a key challenge for any airlines (especially if you are not Ryanair or Easyjet). How to market the other end of the route that is not Ireland/UK, not easy to do. Without the scale of operations that FR has around Europe it is difficult to pitch for the business to potential customers, despite how keenly priced it may be (ie for Aer Lingus), simply so difficult to market the audience in a meaningful way outside of Ireland.
We only seem to be able to attract Irish travellers
I travel to Spanish inlaws a lot, recently when waiting for my flight Alicante/Belfast, 2 flights (FR + EI) were leaving for Dublin. I noticed as I was waiting that FR seemed to have a lot more european customers than Irish and it appeared that EI was attracting a lot of Irish and not so many Spaniards. Ryanair have such an advantage in that the natives in any of the European countries will check Ryanair for flights and will often book with them without evening having checked other smaller companies, leads to another interesting point, FR dont always need to be cheap to attract the customer as often as far as many can see there are no others on may routes Ie if they dont check EI, and other carriers operating.
I suppose its the result of the move away from travel agents and the companies who have really embraced and exploited deregulations enjoy other benefits that smaller rivals cant.
EI-BUD