After a rocky tenure as minister for housing, Darragh O’Brien might have thought he was in for a smooth ride when he took up the transport portfolio. But it was not to be.
Relentless turmoil over the future of DAA chief executive Kenny Jacobs leaves the Minister with serious questions to answer over the running of the airports group, one of the most politically sensitive semi-State companies whose operations are critical for the national economy.
DAA was already facing multiple challenges when O’Brien took office in January, assuming the role of shareholder on behalf of the State in the company that runs Dublin and Cork airports. The organisation was in conflict with Fingal County Council over a key planning file – prompting an extraordinary complaint to the Minister’s department – and facing high-stakes litigation over the annual 32 million passenger cap in Dublin that was breached in 2024 and again in 2025.
If this were not enough, two formal complaints against Jacobs triggered a spectacular bust-up with the DAA board that was still fully unresolved as Christmas loomed. This was several months after the board, chaired by businessman Basil Geoghegan, reached the conclusion that it no longer wanted Jacobs to lead the company.
RM Block
The situation is highly charged legally, with teams of lawyers assembled by both sides in the row. It is also highly charged politically, not least because O’Brien is a prospective candidate for the Fianna Fáil leadership as some party TDs question the role of Taoiseach Micheál Martin after its presidential election campaign imploded.
“DAA is more porous than the Cabinet and that’s saying something,” one senior political figure said. This means practically everything happening in the airport group plays out in the public glare, another consideration for O’Brien as he observes the drama in Dublin Airport, where many of his Dublin Fingal East constituents work.
If it is unlikely that the Minister would hanker after the housing tensions that marked his time in the Custom House, he faced one problem after another in DAA in what turned out to be a year of disruption and rancour.
True, O’Brien asserted his authority by refusing to back a near €1 million termination payment for Jacobs. The exit deal, agreed via mediation but which has now lapsed, would have seen Jacobs stand down on January 3rd and receive a €960,000 payment.
That sum did not include Jacobs’ legal fees, which were to be met separately by DAA. They are likely to be very considerable, after months of friction with the DAA board. Solicitors McCann FitzGerald are acting for DAA while Jacobs is represented by Arthur Cox.
The Minister’s decision to veto the deal had the immediate benefit that he avoided political flak – in advance of a possible party leadership contest – for approving a big payment to a semi-State chief leaving years early in his term. Yet it still left the question of Jacobs’ future unresolved and DAA facing into 2026 with a mountain of unfinished business on O’Brien’s watch.
This is not the limit of the obstacles confronting O’Brien as the new year approaches. In his other role as Minister for Climate, Environment and Energy, he faces a complex series of challenges to tackle serious electricity network constraints that have hampered housing delivery and industry. Water contraints are another test.
But it was DAA that stood out in 2025 – for all the wrong reasons.
Fingal chief executive AnnMarie Farrelly took the unusual step in January of accusing DAA of “absolutely shocking behaviour” in a planning matter when making a complaint to the top aviation official in the Department of Transport. At issue was DAA’s angry response to an adverse Fingal ruling on its “no build” bid to lift the cap to 36 million.
Farrelly accused DAA of releasing emails to give a “false impression” about pre-planning requests to the local authority, saying “something has to change here”. She did not mention Jacobs by name, although he had taken the lead in DAA’s response to a Fingal ruling that its planning submission was invalid.
The DAA application in question, which the company’s board decided in November to halt, was one of two with Fingal. The other is a major infrastructure application lodged in 2023 that remains with local authority planners.
The continuing application will proceed separately to moves by O’Brien to progress primary legislation on the passenger cap. He secured Cabinet agreement for that step in September but the road ahead is long. Despite clear breaches of the cap in 2024 and 2025, legal enforcement was suspended for two years in April pending litigation in the European courts. It follows that the cap remains a risk for DAA and O’Brien.
The row with Fingal may well be seen as an example of how some of Jacobs’ interlocutors bristled at his “elbows out” approach. He had taken command of DAA in January 2023, having previously worked for Ryanair as chief marketing officer. Ryanair has long been dominated by Michael O’Leary, whose pugnacious management style set the tone for the airline as it advanced over decades to become, this year, the first European carrier with 200 million annual passengers.
Jacobs’ approach might have suited Ryanair but DAA, often lampooned by O’Leary and his colleagues, was a different type of organisation.
Trouble beckoned for Jacobs and the DAA board when a protected disclosure was made against him on February 4th. Such disclosures are made under whistleblower law that protects complainants from dismissal or penalisation for reporting possible wrongdoing. Matters escalated when a second protected disclosure was made against the chief executive on March 20th.
These complaints came little more than two years into Jacobs’ seven-year term in the airport. Ultimately, they ended up with a DAA board subgroup, comprising DAA non-executive directors Risteard Sheridan and Paula Cogan. Sheridan is company secretary and chief compliance officer at AerCap, the aircraft leasing giant. Cogan is global head of sales for hotel groups Miiro and K&K, which are controlled by Indian aviation and hospitality conglomerate InterGlobe.
In April, the subgroup appointed Mark Connaughton SC to investigate the protected disclosures. Connaughton delivered his report on the second disclosure in June and on the first complaint in July. In each case, the barrister did not uphold the claims made against Jacobs.
By any standard, such conclusions were a boon to Jacobs. Despite such findings, however, the board resolved within weeks that Jacobs was not suitable for the post.
So what happened? What explains the breakdown in relations? How did Jacobs find himself on one side of a major rift with the DAA board?
The answer lies in the fact DAA directors had new concerns that emerged separately to his exoneration by Connaughton. What is more, such concerns were deemed serious enough in the board’s assessment to merit reconsideration of Jacobs’ role less than half-way into his term.
On October 3rd, a DAA board delegation comprising Geoghegan, Sheridan, Cogan and entrepreneur Karen Morton – another non-executive director – briefed O’Brien and department officials on the situation. They set out how anxiety had emerged in the board about some of Jacobs’ language and behaviour and other issues.
They also told O’Brien of board concern about Jacobs’ response to the protected disclosure process. They went on to set out further board concern about the emergence of other issues separate to those raised in the formal complaints. These included, but were not limited to, questions over certain information from Jacobs to board members.
There was concern also over proposed changes, later scrapped, to DAA’s policy on the provision of wheelchairs to passengers with restricted movement.
The meeting with the Minister was told how Jacobs was offered an opportunity to consider his behaviour. Still, DAA directors concluded the chief executive had not showed appropriate understanding of the issues or a way forward to address them.
Once the board reached the view that Jacobs was unsuitable to continue, mediation was seen as a good option to pursue as it could avoid a public – and expensive – airing of the issues in the High Court.
Each of the alternative options presented the prospect of Jacobs taking legal action against the board. They included a full investigation into the other issues that emerged after the protected disclosures, a no-confidence vote in the chief executive or the initiation of a disciplinary process.
The board chose mediation, entering talks with Jacobs in August under the chairmanship of industrial relations troubleshooter Kieran Mulvey. This process, which culminated in the proposed €960,000 deal, was well advanced in September when news of the boardroom rift spilled into the open in media reporting. From that point on, it was a public controversy.
The board delegation told the Minister the exit payment should be judged not in terms of fairness to Jacobs and more in terms of the value to DAA of returning to routine business after a period of turmoil. However, O’Brien blocked the money and urged the parties to reconcile. The board immediately replied to the Minister that its stance was unchanged since directors unanimously approved the proposed payment.
These exchanges with the Minister led to another round of talks between legal representatives for the DAA board and Jacobs, which ended without an agreement and the lapsing of the deal brokered by Mulvey. After those talks ended, Jacobs let it be known he wanted to reconcile. But the parties remained far apart, leading the board to serve notice on Jacobs in mid-December of its intention to suspend him on full pay pending a new investigation.
Eleven months after the saga began with the submission of the first protected disclosure, Jacobs also learned that the board had appointed a deputy chief executive. The post went to Nick Cole, the chief of DAA International, the company’s airport consulting arm, and a member of the DAA executive team.
DAA had insisted for months that it was business as usual in Dublin and Cork airports. In reality, however, it was anything but a business-as-usual situation and one that projected an image of instability.
For now, a pall of uncertainty hangs over Dublin Airport. For O’Brien, DAA has been nothing but a headache this year.
