Airport priests have seen a decline in passengers and morale at Irish airports, but their optimism remains, writes Jason Osborne
The aviation industry has been much reported as having taken a serious blow throughout the pandemic.
Recent figures from the Central Statistics Office (CSO) show that there were 85,400 overseas passenger arrivals and 97,000 overseas passenger departures during May of this year, which signals a nearly threefold increase over May 2020’s figures, during which there were 28,300 arrivals and 36,300 departures.
However, most strikingly is the fact that for every overseas traveller in May of this year, there were 20 in pre-pandemic May 2019, when there were 1,818,900 arrivals and 1,851,600 departures.
It is against this backdrop that Irish airports, and the priests who serve them, find themselves positioned.
Speaking to The Irish Catholic newspaper, Fr Des Doyle of Our Lady Queen of Heaven Church at Dublin Airport said there was just a “trickle” of people passing through for most of the pandemic to this point, but that it has picked up somewhat in recent months.
“We remained open for prayer and we had a small trickle because the number of passengers was hugely reduced. We opened as soon as we could for public Masses again and we have all our people back, well, within the restrictions,” he said.
“So we’re fully operating again and we have our great community here of former staff and current staff who pass through, as well as passengers and some local people living around.”
While the church may be back in business, staff and passengers aren’t at this moment in time. Numbers are picking up, but employees and jet-setters are still feeling the effects of the restrictions on travel, according to Fr Doyle.
“From a passenger point of view in the terminals there’s just so little happening”, he said, explaining that at times his job has been “really just encouraging staff, a lot of whom are in trouble with their jobs and losing jobs and losing hours and all that, you know?
“I’m talking to people all the time, workers here…mixing with workers and that. It’s the same in my local parish – I’m involved in the local parish as well and we’d have a lot of airline workers there, so it’s a very difficult time for them.”
Similar
It’s a similar story for Fr Richard Gibbons of Knock Shrine, who’s a trust member with Ireland West Airport in Co. Mayo.
“The airport was growing year on year up to the pandemic, and 2019 was one of the biggest years yet. It was hovering around 800,000 passengers a year,” Fr Gibbons said, adding, “It was growing all the time, but that was cut down to zero, obviously, during the pandemic”.
“So that would be the norm before Covid and then of course with Covid everything just shut down, just as simple as that.
“I think I’ve been in the airport once or twice since then, once getting the test and at another point for something else. It’s only barely picking up now, it’s not like Dublin,” he said.
There are flights “going in and out” at the moment, but it’s “very small” in number, Fr Gibbons said.
With regards the effects on the staff there, who’ve suffered the same uncertainties as aviation staff all over Ireland, Fr Gibbons said it’s “very difficult on people”.
“Even for the immediate staff and even the staff that were left because they had to keep the whole thing ticking over until such time as flights began again – that was very, very difficult on people.
“On airports in particular, because of travel, people were just wondering about the future of the airport and all that. It has a very good future, there’s no doubt, but it’ll take an awful lot of work to get it back up again.”
However, Fr Gibbons has hope, mainly due to the positive trends that were in place before the pandemic. There’s an appetite for travel and the service, in his opinion.
“Yet again, you could say once things open up further, and we don’t know when that’ll be with the variant and variants into the future, but it could pick up quite briskly, because there is obviously, due to figures pre-pandemic, a market still here for travel,” he said.
Ireland West Airport, or Knock Airport as it’s colloquially dubbed, is “owned by the people,” Fr Gibbons said, meaning that the decline in activity had a real effect on the western community.
“It’s held in trust for the people of the west. It’s a private airport. It’s not State-owned, although it does get State aid – no more than any business during the pandemic. Knock Airport would be hugely grateful for that support.”
Essential
Community is an essential aspect of both airports, and both Fr Gibbons and Fr Doyle take immense pride in the work and purpose the airports lend to those associated with them.
“We’re very proud of the airport, I have to say, we’re very, very proud, myself and the archbishop and indeed all the people of the west. It’s just one of those gems that’s founded on the back of ordinary people contributing to something that we knew was important for the west, so we’re very proud of it,” Fr Gibbons said.
“We’ve a very strong community here of people who literally built the church in 1964, they paid for the church to be built, the airline workers or the airport workers, and so they have a great sense of community and belonging to it here and fondness for it,” Fr Doyle said of the Dublin Airport church and community, before concluding “We’ll be very happy to see more airplanes in the sky. I like the airplanes and I like the people. I look forward to seeing them back.”