THE DUBLIN AIRPORT AUTHORITY and Ryanair have begun a war of words over the airline’s accusations that the authority ‘rejected’ its offer to bring four million extra passengers to Ireland every year.

Meetings yesterday between DAA chief executive Declan Collier and representatives from the airline saw the airport authority offer the airline €60m of discounts on its airport charges in return for a promise of increased passenger numbers.

DAA said the talks had broken down, however, after Ryanair demanded over €100m in discounts, without making any guarantees of bringing additional traffic to the airport, while also seeking a further €10m in discounts in respect of its existing passenger load.

Ryanair hit back, though, asserting that DAA was discriminating against it under its proposed discount scheme, which would see the current traffic inventive scheme extended in Dublin only after airlines had reversed cuts to routes from Cork and Shannon.

Further, it would see 60 per cent of the discounts generated by Ryanair’s traffic growth awarded to other airlines, which Ryanair says should not be given rewards while they continue to cut routes.

Ryanair’s proposal, DAA said, would have seen the airline potentially reap rewards for reducing its flight operations in Cork and Shannon, and transferring them to Dublin.

Collier said the Ryanair proposal was “unrealistic and unsustainable”, and said Ryanair was unwilling to indicate how many of the four million passengers would be additional traffic, or how many would be inbound tourists.

Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary, however, said it was “extraordinary that the DAA [...had] rejected Ryanair’s officer of four million passenger growth, and said the DAA was unwilling to fund the reward scheme for Ryanair because it would simply have been “too expensive”.

The airline was set to carry about 5m extra passengers this year, but would “not now allocate any of this traffic to Dublin”.

The DAA should have been split up, he added, so that Collier “can then spend more time sitting on the board of the AIB where his undoubted commercial talents are having a similar effect on banking as they are having on Ireland’s airports.”

The airline this morning asked Collier to explain why airlines cutting traffic to Dublin, like Aer Lingus, were receiving “growth subsidies” while Ryanair was being denied the same incentives.