Derry ratepayers bore ‘unfair’ airport burden and that’s why DfE is taking over: Murphy
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00:00In terms of Derry Airport then, again just to touch on, since your announcement in October,
00:06we now have 130, more than 130 flights per month going out of Derry, with two new routes
00:12to Edinburgh and Liverpool, we have the extension of an existing route to Birmingham, so again
00:16really positive in that space.
00:20How do you intend and how can your department work to continue that sustainability and actually
00:27to continue that growth trajectory which we've seen so far?
00:31Well, the difficulty we had was, and this became more evident during COVID when we were
00:36trying to find ways to support the airports at the close down, so as an island, airports
00:42are critical to us, and we have three significant commercial ones here, and we were trying to
00:49find a way to support them and we found that infrastructure responsibility for some parts
00:53of it, economy responsibility for parts of it, finance responsibility, so it was kind
00:59of a bit of a mix mash, so what we want to do is, from our perspective, and we have agreement
01:05with other departments and agencies, the airports are a very significant economic contributor,
01:10because they do that connectivity off the island to Britain and then to internationally
01:15to the north and south as well, so we want to ensure that we have a policy which supports
01:20the development of airports and recognises the economic contribution that they make,
01:24and that's why we moved to try and take the policy in relation to airports and aviation
01:30into the Department of Economy, because we had I think at least two, maybe three different
01:35departments all having some input, and that's just a mess when you're trying to deal with
01:39issues in relation to that.
01:40So part of that responsibility then is taking responsibility for a city and area airport,
01:46and one of the economic instabilities they had, they were consistently reliant on ratepayers
01:51in Derry, City and Strabane to pay that contribution into the airport.
01:55The airport serves more than Derry, City and Strabane, it serves Causeway, Coast and Glens,
02:00Council it serves, arguably beware it's from Malinoma, it serves Donegal as well, so it
02:05was an unfair burden on ratepayers in Derry, plus it didn't lend itself to the stability
02:10that you want in terms of investment in the airport and making sure that it continues
02:14to grow more routes and become a stronger part of an economic hub in the North West,
02:19and that's a catalyst and a vitally important part of the economic growth opportunity in
02:24the North West is to have a functioning airport there, and not one which is constantly a threat
02:29hanging over whether will it survive next year, will it survive the year after that,
02:32and has it a long term future.
02:34So in that regard we undertook to take that responsibility, that's a challenge because
02:38we've been through all of the challenges that we have in the department, but we undertook
02:42as part of that regional balance approach, as part of trying to grow the economy in a
02:45regionally balanced way, then this is a very important asset in the North West which makes
02:50a contribution to that.
02:51So we have undertaken to find the money to support that going forward.
02:55We obviously are working on business cases, working with the Department of Infrastructure
03:00to try and sort out the barriers for how we do that, but in terms of the policy approach
03:06we are taking airports as much as we possibly can in relation to responsibility.
03:12There are some responsibilities that are obviously reserved in Britain in relation
03:15to aviation as well, but taking that responsibility into ourselves and trying to find the finances
03:21to support Derry Airport.
03:22We've committed to doing that, so that's what we'll do in time ahead.