Cork is doing well to be holding around 2.4million pax a year. It'd be great to get back over 3million but that figure was reached at a time when there was 11 flights a day to Dublin, incredibly low fares on Ryanair routes and people taking multiple city breaks every year.
One concern I would have is that Cork is now depending to a much larger extent on Ryanair than it was in the last decade. We know from Shannon's experience with them that traffic could fall very dramatically if they decide to pull routes. Their present strategy seems to be to go to head to head with Aerlingus on most Sun routes which means that we probably have an oversupply of seats to Spain, Portugal and the Canaries and not enough to other destinations.
It's hard to see where any further growth is going to come from unless Aerlingus look at basing a 4th aircraft in winter and a 5th aircraft in Summer. Overseas airlines are unlikely to touch Cork given the local populations preference to fly with aircraft that have harps and shamrocks on their tails.