{"id":259168,"date":"2025-12-31T03:24:16","date_gmt":"2025-12-31T03:24:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/259168\/"},"modified":"2025-12-31T03:24:16","modified_gmt":"2025-12-31T03:24:16","slug":"belfast-airports-stormont-officials-wanted-to-keep-two-belfast-airports-despite-being-warned-dublin-would-outcompete-them","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/259168\/","title":{"rendered":"Belfast airports: Stormont officials wanted to keep two Belfast airports \u2013\u00a0despite being warned Dublin would outcompete them"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"beltel-ebe0ecc6_root beltel-ebe0ecc6_paragraph beltel-91174671_secondary beltel-1d70522a_marginbottom4 beltel-1d70522a_marginleft0 beltel-1d70522a_marginright0 beltel-1d70522a_margintop4\" style=\"color:var(--color-primary-80)\" data-testid=\"title-summary\">Civil servants and ministers made clear they preferred to keep two smaller airports in Belfast rather than one regional hub airport, with one official saying he would rewrite consultants\u2019 report if necessary\n<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"Dublin Airport has dramatically leapt ahead of Belfast's airports. Photo: Getty\" src=\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/da89d71a-a9a3-46b6-bfd0-1b562079bfd5.jpg\" loading=\"eager\" width=\"100%\" data-testid=\"article-image\"  \/><\/p>\n<p class=\"beltel-ebe0ecc6_root beltel-ebe0ecc6_caption1 beltel-300db776_none beltel-91174671_secondary beltel-66f0fec7_regular beltel-1d70522a_marginbottom0 beltel-1d70522a_marginleft0 beltel-1d70522a_marginright0 beltel-1d70522a_margintop3 beltel-b48c4984_left\" style=\"color:var(--color-grey-60)\">Dublin Airport has dramatically leapt ahead of Belfast&#8217;s airports. Photo: Getty<\/p>\n<p class=\"beltel-ebe0ecc6_root beltel-ebe0ecc6_paragraph beltel-300db776_none beltel-91174671_primary beltel-1d70522a_marginbottom0 beltel-1d70522a_margintop0 beltel-b48c4984_inherit\" style=\"color:var(--color-primary-80)\">Civil servants were told a quarter of a century ago that Dublin Airport would pull more and more passengers from Northern Ireland unless there was a single Belfast Airport &#8211; but they fought against that suggestion.<\/p>\n<p class=\"beltel-ebe0ecc6_root beltel-ebe0ecc6_paragraph beltel-300db776_none beltel-91174671_primary beltel-1d70522a_marginbottom0 beltel-1d70522a_margintop0 beltel-b48c4984_inherit\" style=\"color:var(--color-primary-80)\">Files declassified at the Public Record Office in Belfast show Stormont unease at a study commissioned by Whitehall\u2019s Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions (DETR) which examined the future of air travel in Northern Ireland.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Civil servants and ministers made clear they preferred to keep two smaller airports in Belfast rather than one&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":259169,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[59103,9,10,133818,26,18,13,14,64811,6,19,17,11,12,15,16,5,133817,7,8],"class_list":{"0":"post-259168","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ireland","8":"tag-belfast-international-airport","9":"tag-breaking-news","10":"tag-breakingnews","11":"tag-declassified-files","12":"tag-dublin-airport","13":"tag-eire","14":"tag-featured-news","15":"tag-featurednews","16":"tag-george-best-belfast-city-airport","17":"tag-headlines","18":"tag-ie","19":"tag-ireland","20":"tag-latest-news","21":"tag-latestnews","22":"tag-main-news","23":"tag-mainnews","24":"tag-news","25":"tag-sam-mcbride","26":"tag-top-stories","27":"tag-topstories"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/115812044861236888","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259168","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=259168"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259168\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/259169"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=259168"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=259168"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=259168"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}