It’s interesting for us down here in the southside to hear the big news this week (well, one of the big bits of news aside from the Super Bowl, or whatever breach of human decency is being committed by one despot or another,) that the Dublin airport passenger cap is to be scrapped.

It won’t make a huge different to many of us who book our holidays based on where you can get to without trekking to Dublin. Schedules from Cork, Shannon, and Kerry airport are relatively scant but very serviceable, and a stopover in a UK airport is often preferable to driving to Dublin airport.

And it will be driving, because of course there’s no train or Luas to the country’s primary airport. The coach waiting area, familiar to all unfortunate public-transport souls, is grey, perpetually wet, cold, and grim. It’s tough to end your holiday with a long wait for a bus that may or may not have a working toilet and so we drive or we beg a relative or friend, adding to the M50’s woes,

Some time ago, a flight from Kerry airport involved a nice man pointing to the plane on the left for Frankfurt, and the plane on the right for London. Security was there, somewhere in between the brown soda bread and green keyrings and the experience infinitely nicer than anywhere else. Kerry airport proudly opened their new arrivals hall back in November. The project cost a very economic €5 million, and was finished in less than 12 months, meaning it barely made a ripple on the news front (aside from in Kerry, naturally).

Cork airport today is vastly bigger and unrecognisable from the departures hall with the statue of Jack Charlton by the fountain, the giant goldfish, and the big bar area upstairs with a viewing platform in the innocent pre-9/11 era. A €200 million investment plan is in the works at the moment there too, which should allow the airport to grow beyond its current  annual five million passengers.

90% of visitors to Ireland come by air, and while it’s normal and natural for a foreign-born person to think that flying to the capital of a small country is a sensible thing to do, we bet that they aren’t quite so naïve the second time they come to the Emerald Isle. To get to West Cork, Kerry, to Galway, Limerick, Sligo or Donegal from Dublin airport is a Lord of the Rings style saga, and that’s if you speak the same language as the Bus Éireann timetable.

There is apparently no shortage of people who are willing and want to fly to Dublin, but there are countless too that would choose to fly to Cork or any of the smaller airports for the convenience.

It really is a win-win for everyone if these airports were publicised and championed, and it could make a real difference to the way people visit Ireland. It would open up the country to students and other people who can’t afford to stay in Dublin for even one night, and save us all the navigational quagmire of trying to escape the capital for the countryside.