Senator Gerard Craughwell- speech from 18 Jan 2023

Thank you very much. Good afternoon, Mr Jacobs. Congratulations on your appointment. A tough role ahead of you, I would think. At the outset, I have used Dublin Airport quite a lot since the airport has opened up. I want to take this opportunity to compliment the staff that work under you, particularly those who work at the coalface in security and the like. I have never yet met one that was bad-humoured, albeit that they were under severe pressure. I think it is a mark of the type of people that you employ, that they are able to cope with such a swell of people from time to time. Congratulations on that to all involved out in Dublin Airport. Now, I want to talk about the issue of car parking. As far as I am aware, you operate the red, the green, the blue and two short-term car parks, the one at T2 and the one at T1. I have to say, I see them as the greatest rip-off that ever existed in this country with the cost of parking in Dublin Airport. It is absolutely outrageous, the charges that there are there for people travelling out of the country. Given that you have pointed out that one in four passengers travelling through Dublin Airport are travelling and parking their cars there, and that is down to the policy of this country that we have not put proper infrastructure in place to be able to get to the airport. However, I would again compliment all of the different bus companies that are now feeding passengers into the airport. I hope that improves things. Two things I suppose are on my mind. One is that Dublin Airport is self-funding. Are you charging the enormous charges you are charging for car parking to fund something else? That is the first thing. The second thing is that I am aware of the fact that the former Quick Park went up for tender recently. I understand and maybe you would confirm for me that DAA has won that competition to purchase. Why in God's name would you want to buy another car park? I thought you were into competition. Ryanair brought us from a situation where nobody could afford to fly to everybody who can now afford to fly. It is like jumping on a bus. Why would you want to own all of the car parks? Would you care to address that first for me, please? I am actually going to ask Vincent to talk about the car parking. Thank you for welcoming me into my new role. I love your comment about the staff at Security. I was a big fan of going through Dublin Security when I worked for an airline. It was always really great. There are great people there that make it a seamless process. I think from the issues at the end of May last year up until now and Christmas and everything that happened, I think it is testament to the character that they have and the pride that they have in the role that they do. They really are the people who make it happen. It is a great team. They have worked really, really hard. It is a team that we want to grow and really make airport security something that is just always seamless, nearly always seamless. There will always be Good Friday. There will always be Easter Saturday morning. It is just difficult when you have that big an operation. It is an absolutely great team and they are the ones that make it happen. I am going to hand over to Vincent to talk more about car parking, how it works, what we would like to do so that we make it a good service, how it compares to prices for downtown parking in Dublin and how short-term car parking is very different to long-term car parking that people would use when they are heading into their holidays and how that ties in with people coming up from wider Leinster who will use the longer-term car parks to get to the terminal to go on their holidays. I will hand over to Vincent on that. Yes, the Dublin Airport provides about 26,000 car parking spaces split between short-term and long-term. Our products are in technical terms yield managed. So, essentially, the demand determines the price at particular times of the year. Prices are lower or higher depending on demand. Typically, the type of length of stay that one might have in a short-term car park, which obviously has the convenience of being next to the terminals, might be one, two, three days, a lot of short trips, business trips, etc., and people would be familiar that the longer-term car parks would typically be for longer stays and have bus provision. There is a range of choice. The colour schemes that you quoted there have different service levels or closer or further from the terminals, and there are quite different pricing regimes. You already have competition, essentially, within the car park structure or choice for consumers. For the last number of years, the car park that you referred to previously operated by Quick Park has not been in operation. That car park was publicly made available for sale earlier this year. Among the discussions that we had during the summer here were related to the shortage of car parking spaces available at the airport and the consequent impact on pricing. At the time, and in other forums, we explained, for example, that our long-term car parking pricing on a per-day rate, our system essentially established a cap of €15 per day. I can 100 per cent guarantee for the limited number of hours that I have parked my car in a local car park here. I will pay more for that for the presence here at the meeting than one would do for an overnight 24-hour stay at Dublin Airport. When that car park became available for sale, we expressed our interest. We are in a process. We do not own the car park yet, but we would be optimistic or hopeful that, in consultation with stakeholders, including regulatory stakeholders and the completion of contractual terms, we would be hopeful that we would be in a position to provide that extra car parking capability to the public for next summer, if that transpires that we are in a position to complete that sale. I am going to declare my hand here. When I heard that DA were in the competition, I was rather surprised. When I heard that you won the competition, I was even more surprised. I have asked the competition authority to look into this. I do not believe that it is right that you should have all the car parking within the confines of Dublin Airport. I do believe the sale is conditional on the competition authority approving it. That is a process which could go in any direction and take any length of time as the regulatory authorities seek to ensure that the public's interest is protected, if you want. Have you a contingency plan in place if this just does not go right? Or have you a leaser that would take it as a sort of a lease from Dublin Airport Authority to run and manage it? I mean, opening up Quick Park has been locked up for a long time now, so opening it up is going to take time and a lot of planning. If things go askew, have you got a contingency plan in place? Well, first of all, I think for all the reasons that you have called out there, it would be preferable that these processes are completed quickly and smoothly and clearly among the stakeholders that that we are actively and proactively engaging with are the authority that you mentioned. We considered a whole variety of contingency measures last year when it was apparent that there were not sufficient availability of capacity, including discussions as to whether we could indeed lease short-term that car park. That was not made available to us and did not come to fruition. We also engaged with the department to see whether we could achieve fast-track emergency provision to enable us to expand car parking into other temporary areas. Again, that was not considered to be capable to be provided by the Department of the Minister. There are a whole range of ways that we sought to make available more capacity. We engaged in extensive promotion of alternative routes to the airport use of public transport. We have engaged with the Department of Transport again in relation to bus provision because one of the things that has happened in relation to the return of public transport is that while in the middle of the day many of the services have returned, in the early hours and night time when either our staff are looking to access the airport for early starts or indeed many of the passengers are coming for early morning flights, that type of capacity has not been properly restored yet in the public transport system. There are indeed a range of contingencies that we have sought and will continue to seek, but they are not all entirely within our gift. We are absolutely anxious and we made this our number one priority to say that if there is available existing capacity, rather than leaving it closed and shuttered, we are interested in making it available to passengers. On the contingency side of things, if this committee can be of assistance, I would ask you to make any submission that you feel is necessary because my interest is not to support the private sector or any sector. My interest is that we get competition for the end-user, the consumer, and I felt that having all the car parking space just did not smack up right. If I am correct, there were five or six entities expressed an interest in Quick Park and, if I am right, you were actually the lowest bidder, which, as I understand, has annoyed quite a number of the other entities. They thought there was a second round coming along that has not come along. That is between the vendors and your staff. I think you would have to take that up with the vendors. Yes, yes. Mike, just be careful in your questioning. No, no, no problem. I am not suggesting anything. We are only 40 seconds left. Yes, absolutely. Yes, just your original point to Vincent. I suppose our primary priority here is that the car parking space is available. Back to the original point around the commercial revenues that we generate, simplistically with regard to our overall regulatory model that we have discussed, all of that incremental commercial revenue is ultimately taken into account to reduce the price cap. This is not an opportunity for us to make incremental revenue. Ultimately, it is all taken into account. You would accept that if you had a monopoly, you could. Yes, but not to your ultimate benefit. Yes, exactly. Thank you, Senator Crockwell. Yes, thank you very much and thank you for your candour. I appreciate it. Is it fair to say that the more places you have, you are talking about demand pricing, that the average price should fall? It would, yes. Yes, that is our intention. We do not want people to have this somewhere, the issue of, am I going to have an issue getting parking? We do not want anyone in their heads, am I going to have an issue at security? We want to take these things off the table. More spaces means that it is supply and demand. If there is more capacity in the system, notwithstanding everything Vincent has said, regardless of who owns it, if there is more supply, the price should come down. Taking a longer-term view, as we said in your statement, we want Metro North and Bus Connects to work. We have a space reserved between T1 and T2 short-term car parks near the church at the airport. That is where we want the station to be, and we want that to happen in the longer time frame, so that you have better public transport options to go to the airport. For those who are coming up from Leish, from Kildare, from all parts of the country, to fly from Dublin, they can, on a big holiday, stay in a long-term car park. If you are going tomorrow on a short-term business trip, you can get a short-term space, and supply and demand will determine the price, but we want to provide a good service. I will let somebody else take that point up, because you have concluded with the point. Could you accommodate two stations? Senator Dooley, you are next. Thank you.