Prime Minister Leo Varadkar's support for the Indian dream; Leo wants to increase the passenger limit

Dublin: Leo Varadkar wants to increase the airport's capacity to 32 million passengers a year. Otherwise Ireland will lose out on new airline routes.

In a landmark intervention, Tishek announced his support for removing the current cap imposed under planning laws, describing it as "draconian" and highlighting the problems it would create in attracting new routes within and outside the country. " "I say it needs to go through a planning process, but Dublin Airport is the gateway to the country. We are an island and you can do so much on board,

But aviation is the way we get on and off the island for commercial, personal travel and capping, and I think that creates a difficulty," Varadkar told Irish reporters during a trade mission to South Korea last week.

“I know the reality of it from my time as transport minister that airlines will fly where they want, and you can't tell someone who's thinking about starting a direct flight from Ireland to India or from Ireland to Brazil. Instead to another airport. Instead they go to another country, "So if we cap flights at Dublin Airport, we lose routes or we don't get new routes that we would otherwise have." He said.

“In an ideal world, you'd say what you're doing is up to 32 million in Dublin. In the real world, when airlines decide where to fly, the risk is that we lose routes from Ireland to other airports, and we don't get direct routes to Asia, India, Africa, Latin America. "So that's a tough issue like that. Varadkar said he "didn't have a figure in mind" when asked if he would support plans to move the limit to 40 million.

But I don't think it makes sense in terms of tourism, in terms of our economy, in terms of people-to-people contact around the world, at a time when we're looking at creating new additional direct routes to Ireland. To impose such a restriction on us,” he said.

Airport management, which has reported more than 25 million passengers in the first nine months of this year, is seeking an increase to the limit, meaning travel returns to pre-pandemic levels.

Varadkar said he wanted to see the country's other airports doing better and welcomed the increase in passenger numbers at Cork, Shannon and Knock. However, he said the reality for the industry was that the state could not tell airlines that wanted to open routes from Dublin to fly to other airports instead.