Ryanair to lay off 200 at Dublin

Ryanair today announced 200 job losses among flight crew and engineers at it's Dublin base. Blaming the introduction of the €10 flat rate tourist tax and the Dublin Airport Authority's airport charges, the airline said that the cutbacks represent the first ever reduction in it's summer schedule at Dublin.

The full extent of the measures are :

• A reduction in based aircraft from 22 to 18
• A reduction in the number of weekly rotations from over 700 to under 600
• Passengers carried reduced from 10.8m to 8.7m
• The loss of 200 jobs in aircrew and ground staff

The airline also add that there will be further cuts in Dublin's winter schedule to be announced later.

Referring to the travel tax, Ryanair's CEO Michael O'Leary said that “This travel tax has already failed in the UK and Dutch markets, where they caused traffic declines and sadly the Irish Government’s tourist tax is doomed to a similar failure. This Government must realise you can only promote tourism by welcoming visitors, not taxing them".

As with the recently announced scaling back of operations at Shannon, Ryanair have said that they will immediately reverse both the Dublin and Shannon decisions should the Irish government reverse it's decision on the travel tax.