City of Derry Airport to be directly funded by Executive

The City of Derry Airport’s running costs are set to be directly funded by the Department for the Economy, following an agreement reached in October 2024.

The airport, which is owned by Derry City and Strabane Council, is to receive approximately £3.5 million in departmental funding in an effort to reduce the burden of funding on the council, which spent £3.45 million in funds raised from local ratepayers in the previous financial year.

Then-Minister for the Economy Conor Murphy announced the measure in October 2024, with operational costs to be covered for the airport from 1 April 2025, using funding earmarked by the Department. As of early April 2025, the business case has to be signed off by the Minister for the Economy, but a spokesperson for DfE said that this is a “priority item” for the Minister.

The spokesperson added: “A business case to provide funding to Derry City and Strabane District Council from 1 April 2025 to 31 March 2029 has been prepared by DfE and is now going through the relevant approval process.”

In the Programme for Government, the Executive has committed to fund and support the airport, which recently secured a number of new routes and was granted UK Government funding to maintain its route to London Heathrow Airport until at least 2027.

The route to London Heathrow is carried out by regional Scottish airline Loganair, and will be done through the Public Service Obligation Scheme, with just over £7 million in funding having been granted by the UK Department for Transport and the Department for the Economy.

In 2024, the airport handled 179,095 passengers, far below both airports in Belfast and below all other eight airports on the island of Ireland with the exceptional of Donegal Airport. At the height of the Irish aviation boom in 2008, the airport was handling 438,996 passengers per year.

Three airlines – Ryanair, Loganair, and easyJet – currently fly to and from Derry, offering flights to Manchester, Glasgow, London Heathrow, Edinburgh, and Liverpool. In April 2025, easyJet announced that it would commence a new route to Birmingham in September 2025.

Ryanair only flies one route – to Manchester – from Derry but was once the largest user of the airport. However, the low-cost airline withdrew from Derry in December 2020 after the UK Government’s Brexit arrangements forbade airlines to fly domestic UK routes using aircraft which were registered in the EU.

Although Ryanair subsequently returned to the airport in 2021 after a restructuring of the airline, the future of the City of Derry airport remains uncertain, as attempted privatisation efforts have failed to materialise and airport traffic remains significantly below the pre-2008 recession heights, all while the aviation industry faces potential downturn amid decarbonisation obligations and rising prices for consumers.

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