THE worth of Kerry Airport was highlighted yet again recently when flights that could not land in Cork, because of stormy weather, were diverted there. However, it should not take a crisis situation to wake people up to the value of having such a facility in the heart of Kerry.

It’s all very well to say that passenger numbers at the airport have increased greatly in the last couple of years, but the airport’s potential has not yet been fully realised.

When he was chairman of the airport company, Denis Brosnan, made it a priority to build a new runway capable of taking jet traffic. The runway was provided, but there should be many more jets coming in. There were a few transatlantic flights, more or less to show what the airport was capable of.

If what Tourism Minister John O’Donoghue is currently talking about comes to pass, Farranfore could become a much busier place before too long.

At present, Aer Lingus has services to Ireland out of only four gateway American cities - New York, Boston, Chicago and Los Angeles. The air agreement between this country and the US is due to be renegotiated and Mr O’Donoghue believes transatlantic services could be provided from 12 to 18 American cities.

We had a ridiculous situation last year where many people who wished to travel from America to Ireland were unable to do so simply because not enough flights were available.

Mr O’Donoghue says he wants to see access to this country opened up and improved. He says he’s confident new US airlines will be flying to Ireland in 2005. And, if more flights are to be laid on from the US why should they all have to go to Shannon, or Dublin? Why can’t people be flown directly into Kerry?

We’ve seen the success of the Kerry/Frankfurt service and there’s no reason why a regular Kerry/New York service, for instance, could not be equally successful. John Coffey, president of the Kerry branch of the Irish Business and Employers’ Confederation (IBEC), stressed the importance of the Kerry Airport when he addressed the IBEC branch dinner, at the weekend.

“It (the airport) is fundamental to business growth in Kerry. It now requires more investment,” he said. Mr Coffey also said our rail links are crying out for more investment and our roads continue to be congested. Nobody disagrees with that.

Also, our telecommunications network, other than in Tralee and Killarney, is way behind other parts of the country. The above points in regard to transport and access have been highlighted in this column, as has the lack of industrial jobs.

Last week, Scott Tools, which had been in production in Killarney since the late sixties, closed with the loss of 16 jobs.

However, Mr Coffey, looking at the county as a whole, stressed there had been 1,050 redundancies across a range of companies in Kerry, since January 2003. That’s a huge amount of jobs, especially when you consider that scarcely any new projects have been attracted to Kerry during the same period.

A recent survey of Kerry IBEC members showed that non-pay costs, including insurance and energy, had increased by an average of 17 per cent, in 2004, and a further 10 per cent in the current year.

Mr Coffey, who is director of Liebherr, Killarney, urged the government to address the competitiveness problem.