The number of passengers traveling through the main airports in Ireland in June was up nearly 230 percent year on year, but still far below the pre-pandemic level, said the country's Central Statistics Office (CSO), Trend reports citing Xinhua.
In June, the five main airports in Ireland, which, according to Irish aviation authorities, account for around 99 percent of the country's annual airport passenger traffic and handled a total of 309,879 passengers, up 229.3 percent when compared with the same month of last year, said the CSO in a transport bulletin.
However, the June passenger traffic number of the five airports was still 92 percent lower than the same month in 2019 when more than 3.77 million passengers were handled between them, said the CSO, adding that the COVID-19 pandemic continued to have a major impact on the country's airports.
Of all the airport passengers handled in June, 283,883 people or nearly 92 percent were handled by Dublin Airport, up 219 percent year on year but still 91 percent lower than June 2019, the CSO figures showed.
Dublin Airport said in a press release Tuesday that it handled almost 658,000 passengers in July, up 72.7 percent compared to July 2020 but still 81 percent lower than the pre-pandemic level in July 2019.
In the first half of this year, the five main airports in Ireland handled slightly over one million passengers, down 83.35 compared with the same period of last year, according to the CSO.
The Irish airports did not feel the impact of the pandemic until March 2020. In the first two months of 2020 alone, the five main airports in the country handled more than 4.7 million passengers.