7th Jan 2021 08:21
(Alliance News) - Ryanair Holdings PLC on Thursday hit out at the Irish government's latest travel restrictions, as well as its slow vaccination programme.
The carrier now expects traffic for the financial year ending in March of between 26 million and 30 million, its guidance reduced from the previous forecast of "below 35 million".
Ryanair did note, however, these flight cuts and further traffic reductions will not "materially affect" its net loss for the year to March 31, since many of those flights would have been loss making.
Ryanair expects its January traffic to fall to below 1.3 million passengers and Covid-19 restrictions could mean it may only carry 500,000 customers in each of February and March.
The company warned: "In response, Ryanair will significantly cut its flight schedules from Thursday January 21, which will result in few, if any, flights being operated to and from Ireland or the UK from the end of January until such time as these draconian travel restrictions are removed."
The firm called on the UK and Ireland to speed up their vaccination programmes. Ryanair particularly hit out at Ireland, which it said has vaccinated just 4,000 people, ten times slower than Denmark, a population of a similar size.
"The WHO have previously confirmed that governments should do everything possible to avoid brutal lockdowns, because lockdowns 'do not get rid of the virus'. Ireland's Covid-19 travel restrictions are already the most stringent in Europe, and so these new flight restrictions are inexplicable and ineffective when Ireland continues to operate an open border between the Republic and the North of Ireland," a spokesperson for Ryanair said.
The budget airline continued: "[Ireland's] National Public Health Emergency Team, which we believe has mismanaged many aspects of Ireland's Covid response - face masks, test & trace, international travel, care homes and meat factories - should now release a daily report of the number of vaccines administered in Ireland, and explain why they continue to run behind the vaccination rates of other similar sized EU countries.
"Vaccinations rather than lockdowns is the way out of this Covid-19 crisis, and the sooner NPHET takes action to accelerate Ireland's vaccine rollout speed, the better."
Shares in were down 1.2% in London on Thursday morning at EUR15.58 each.
By Paul McGowan; [email protected]
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