Shannon is hardly the first airport to do Santa flights for kids at Christmas, i remember Manchester ran them for years when it perhaps cared more about the community, schools and kids with special needs which Shannon helped with. Very credible too for Ryanair to get lots of publicity for its 10 new destinations from this Spring by using this as a way to publicise (and they did generate loads of publicity for all those new destinations), and cheaper than media advertising.
Moving on <...>
Repeating the denial around this story isn't "moving on". Moving on is, simply, moving on.
The point is not particulary about Santa flights, as exhaustively pointed out at this stage. The point is about artificially boosting passenger numbers, so that a tiny decline can be represented to be a small increase.
There were about 4,500 seats involved. That's enough to transport one third of all primary school children in Count Clare. I'd need to see figures on how this is cheaper than taking out space in the Clare Champion. Because, if it's such a good deal, why isn't everyone doing it?