New figures from the Central Statistics Office show that the number of passengers handled by Irish airports last year rose by 10% compared with 2020 but were still 76% below 2019 numbers.
Today's CSO figures show that 9.1 million passengers passed through the main Irish airports in 2021 as Covid travel restrictions eased.
This was up on the 8.3 million passengers in 2020 but down on the more than 38 million passengers carried in 2019.
The CSO said that in the fourth quarter of 2021, 4.5 million passengers passed through the main Irish airports, a fall of 47% compared with the same time in 2019.
It also noted that Dublin airport accounted for 90% of air passengers carried last year.
Today's figures also reveal that more than 94,000 flights were handled by the country's five main airports in 2021 - Dublin, Cork, Shannon, Knock and Kerry - a fall of 66% compared with 2019.
Dublin accounted for 88% of all flights (82,514), while Shannon handled 5% of all flights (4,836), the CSO added.
London-Heathrow and Amsterdam-Schiphol were the most popular routes for passengers for Dublin airport in 2021.
For Cork airport, London-Heathrow and London-Stansted were the most popular routes.
The top route for Shannon was London-Stansted, while the top route for Kerry and Knock airports was London-Luton in 2021.
The five main airports handled a total of 160,855 tonnes of freight last year, 91% of which was international freight. This was an increase of 10% on 2019, the CSO said.
