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A staggering 5,600 flights were late departing Dublin Airport in March.

New figures revealed by the Dublin Airport Authority show that 2.48 million people passed through Ireland’s busiest airport last month.

This was 30,000 passengers higher than the number which went through in the previous busiest March in 2019 and 33% higher than in March 2022. This is the third consecutive month of record passenger numbers at Dublin. The airport hosted 18,605 flights. However, only 13,004 left the departures gate on time meaning, on average, 746,480 passengers experienced some sort of a delay at the airport in March.

Some of these were as a result of heavy snowfall in March while more were caused by illegal drone activity in the area.

However, figures for Cork Airport, the second busiest airport in the country, show that 85 percent of its 2,669 flights departed on time in the same period.

There have been calls that Dublin Airport should share some of its flights with regional airports in an effort to reduce delays there and to increase productivity in the smaller airports like Kerry, Cork and Shannon.

This time last year Dublin suffered serious delays at its security bays.

At the time North Kerry councillor Jimmy Moloney called for more flights to operate in and out of Kerry Airport in an effort to reduce congestion and this week's figures back up his previous calls.

"Our airport has come on leaps and bounds, they installed a new scanning system which I went through the other week. The management is great at securing new routes, and we've recently had new hospitality facilities open up as well,” he said last April.

"Particularly for people in Munster and in South Leinster this airport is a great