Hundreds of British passengers returning from Dubai have been using Dublin as a back door to avoid strict UK travel restrictions and quarantine in recent days, a fact that has raised great concern among airport staff.
The lights to and from the Middle East, as well as connecting flights from Dublin to the UK, have been extremely busy since the British government authorized direct passenger flights from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) a week ago in an attempt to stop the spread of the highly communicable South African variant of Covid-19.
Evidence has also emerged of an increase in the number of Irish passengers who are willing to accept € 500 fines before traveling to holiday destinations.
After a considerable drop in non-essential travel at Dublin Airport in the first half of last week, a Garda Síochána fined some 60 passengers € 500 last Thursday alone for violating non-essential travel regulations before most of them will fly to destinations. including Dubai, Tenerife and Turkey.
The Gardaí is powerless to stop tourists from traveling even if they are hit with notices of fixed fines. Hundreds of people have chosen to pay the fines and continue to their destination during the last fortnight. The fine for non-essential travel has been increased from € 100 per person to € 500 from last Monday.
The UK travel ban, introduced on January 29, included Emirates’ four Airbus A380 ‘superjumbo’ flights that can carry more than 2,000 people a day between London Heathrow and Dubai.
Dublin is now being used as a way home for many stranded UK tourists and others trapped in the Middle East. It is understood that additional passenger capacity was added to Dublin’s routes from the UAE at least one day last week. Airport staff have begun to describe the route as “Dublin’s dodge,” while arriving English passengers jokingly refer to Dublin as “Canada” due to the ability to easily enter a larger neighbor through the gate. rear, a source said.
The 6.30pm Aer Lingus flight to London connecting with the Emirates flight from Dubai has been particularly popular with UK tourists, many of them dressed for the desert sun, according to sources.
On Thursday night, a 174-seat Airbus departed for London with just 25 vacant seats, a far greater load than it had for most of last year. More than half of the passengers on the flight had arrived from Dubai earlier that day, according to well-placed sources. A larger 317-seat plane carrying 250 passengers was used Friday night, many of them connecting from Dubai, as well as from Portugal, which has also been hit by a strict UK flight ban, sources said. .
By Friday night there were already 210 booked for tonight’s connecting flight.
One witness said that the British exodus from Dubai was “like something out of the fall of Saigon” and that the first arrivals last week had expressed surprise that they were not taken from the plane in Dublin directly to specific waiting areas for wait for transfers.
Many airline and airport employees are believed to be very unhappy because they feel they are being put at risk by passengers, some with little regard for social distancing, but are reluctant to complain at a time when the sector is in dire trouble.
In one incident, Dublin cleaning staff had to scrub after boisterous passengers urinated on various seats on a plane, according to a source.
The airside transfer counter, which had been closed due to lack of connecting traffic, is understood to have reopened late last week to cope with the influx. Before that, many Dubai tourists were collecting their bags and going through immigration to queue for check-in in the public ground areas of the airport.
British citizens who manage to return from the UAE are required to self-isolate for 10 days, but can dodge tough questions about UK immigration if they arrive from Dublin with a separate reservation.
This has meant that while a proportion of these passengers are transferred directly to flights to the UK, many others wait until they arrive in Dublin to book their trips, with a significant number spending the night first in Dublin.
