Fledgling Irish Carrier Helps Pull Airport at Knock Out of the Bog, Into the Black

When Knock Airport opened three years ago in a misty peat bog, critics called it an Irish joke.

Today, the airport that was the dream of a Roman Catholic parish priest is making a small profit, confounding economists, government officials and most everyone else who predicted its speedy demise.

Success is due mainly to a fledgling independent Irish airline, Ryanair, which started using the airport in one of the poorest and most isolated areas of western Ireland when no other carrier was interested.

“We plan to carry more than 100,000 passengers through Knock this year,” said Louise Henahan, a spokeswoman for the airline. “It is definitely not a white elephant,”

The airport owes its existence to the late Msgr. James Horan, who was administrator of the Knock shrine, the most important Catholic shrine in Ireland which attracts more than a million visitors a year.

Horan saw how an airport had benefited Lourdes, France’s famous shrine, and believed one would also transform economically depressed County Mayo, where unemployment is nearly 50% in some areas.

He persuaded the government to give the airport 9.7 million Irish pounds ($6.8 million) and raised an additional 2.5 million pounds ($1.76 million) by traveling the world appealing to Irishmen abroad and organizing collections at home.

For Horan, who died in August 1986, the first flight from the airport on Oct. 25, 1985, was the second miracle of Knock.

The first is in church records as occurring in 1879, when 15 people reported seeing an apparition of the Virgin Mary on the Church of St. John the Baptist, now the centerpiece of the shrine.

As Horan pressed ahead, criticism grew.

Ireland’s communications minister, Jim Mitchell, called Knock Airport “an ill-advised project, far distant from any sizable town, high on a foggy and boggy hill.”

The airport--604 feet above sea level on a peat bog plateau with an 8,100-foot runway capable of handling jumbo jets--officially opened in May, 1986.

But nobody wanted to use it and the staff was put on a week-on, week-off schedule.

Seamus Monaghan, the airport chairman, recalled how Horan wasn’t worried and put his faith in divine intervention.

“Sure enough, 10 days later we had a letter of application from Ryanair,” said Monaghan.

Ryanair started regular flights from Knock in December, 1986, and carried 47,000 passengers in 1987, mainly local people who worked in Britain.

Jim Ryan, the airport company’s secretary, said Ryanair now operates 44 to 46 flights weekly, mainly from Britain, and expects to carry 110,000 to 120,000 passengers through Knock this year. The airport will also handle 10,000 to 20,000 charter flight passengers in 1988, he said.

That’s still far fewer than the 250,000 passengers Horan hoped the airport would handle in its first year.

But Ryan, who would not disclose the figures, said Knock went into the black after its first six months of this year.

The big ambition for Knock is to get direct flights from the United States, which now land at Shannon Airport.

Bridget Watton, 46, an Irish computer operator working in Britain, has used the service since it opened to visit her parents on Achill Island, off Ireland’s west coast.

“It’s a godsend to the west of Ireland,” Watton said on a recent flight from Luton Airport, near London. “Before, it took a day by boat and train to get to Achill. Now, I can get home in six hours.”