Passengers who arrive too early for their flights at Dublin Airport this weekend will be put in a designated holding area as part of plans to avoid further travel disruption.
The airport fell "extremely" short of its obligations to passengers due to a spike in passenger numbers and the absence of 37 staff, the Oireachtas transport committee will be told later today.
During busy times, queues will now be “triaged” so that only passengers with a flight within two and a half hours for short haul or three and a half hours for long haul will be allowed into the departures level.
The transport committee will also hear that an “anomaly” led to 17 new recruits being rostered on security detail last Sunday before they were certified, causing travel chaos at Dublin Airport.
Airport officials briefed Government Ministers on Wednesday morning on their plans to avoid a repeat of the delays last weekend.
According to the Irish Times, senior executives from airport operator DAA met Minister for Transport Eamon Ryan and Minister for State Hildegarde Naughton and gave them details of the plan for the airport. The Oireachtas transport committee is to be briefed at 1.30pm.
The plan is expected to include a new queue management system, more lanes and better use of staffing.
Political reaction
Reacting to the plan to keep early passengers out of the terminal building, People Before Profit TD Richard Boyd Barrett said the move was a "catastrophic failure of management but also of Government."
Minister of State Sean Fleming told RTÉ's Today with Claire Byrne that the proposed plan was a stop gap and "not a solution".
He said: "It is not acceptable. Senior management have to sort this problem out. It is not a quick fix for the bank holiday weekend. This problem has to be taken off the agenda. We can't have a situation where people have difficulty getting in and out [of the airport]."
Earlier, Sinn Féin transport spokesman Darren O’Rourke TD said passengers who are travelling this weekend need “absolute assurance” that this system will work.
“I think there will be concern if it only talks about creating fast queues and slow queues. The question for me really is what additional resources can be brought to bear to ensure that we don’t have the scenes we had last weekend,” he told RTÉ's Morning Ireland.
Mr O’Rourke said DAA has had a contingency plan in place since March but this was still not sufficient to prevent what occurred last weekend.
“And if the plan they come up with this afternoon doesn’t bring additional resources then we can’t have confidence that what happened last weekend isn’t going to happen again. That’s a deep, deep concern.
"I think what we need before this weekend with the resources of the DAA internally but also with the resources of Government we need a commitment, a cast iron guarantee that the scenes we saw last weekend won’t happen during this weekend, or this month, or this summer.
"We need a plan for the whole summer to provide the type of assurance that people need because if we don’t have assurances from the DAA the natural response from people will be to panic, to be concerned, to arrive earlier and that has a knock on consequence in terms of the flow of passengers through the airport."
Mr O'Rourke said the DAA made a management error in letting experienced staff go during the pandemic.
He told Newstalk radio: “It was a gross misjudgement. Whatever the motivation was I think there has been lots of criticism, and I would share it, in terms of how aggressive they were, their cuts and the amount of experienced staff they lost.
"I understand that 80 per cent of experienced members of the unit could have been lost. That makes a difference because it means your organisation capacity is significantly reduced.
"The DAA have a responsibility to know their business. During the pandemic there was a huge pent-up demand for recreation, to visit friends and families.
"We have some of the most successful airlines on the planet in this country. If ever a country was going to rebound well it was Ireland.” – Additional reporting: Olivia Kelleher
