The world’s leading international scheduled airline Ryanair has released its 2015 Irish traffic numbers to December 29, showing a reversal of five years of Irish airport traffic declines, having delivered 70% of all traffic growth at Cork, Dublin, Knock and Shannon airports in 2015 – a record growth year for Irish tourism.

 

The airline says that Irish airports’ traffic growth rose by 3.3m passengers to 29.8m last year, delivering 13.1m passengers (44% of total) and also accounting for 2.2m (70%) of the 3.3m traffic increase. [Ryanair carried more than 86.3m international passengers in 2014 and is forecasting another increase in 2015 when the full numbers are in-Ed].

 

Ryanair spokesman Robin Kiely said: “Before the various tourism bodies claim undue credit for a record year for Irish tourism, Ryanair is pleased to release its 2015 Irish traffic numbers, which show that Ryanair on its own delivered 70% of the growth at the main Irish airports this year, thanks to the Government’s decision to scrap the air travel tax. [back in April 2014-Ed].

 

 

“After five years of decline at Irish airports, the welcome repeal of the air travel tax has resulted in record traffic and tourism growth, demonstrating to our counterparts in the UK and Germany the enormous economic benefits removing APD brings.”

 

IATA reconfirmed Ryanair’s status as the world’s leading international scheduled airline back in June last year with the publication of its World Airline Transport Statistics 2014 report.

 

This showed that Ryanair carried over 86.3m international passengers in 2014 – 30m more than second-placed easyJet (56.3m) and almost 40m more than third-placed Lufthansa (48.2m).