daa has appointed John Coleman, chief executive of Ireland's Land Development Agency, as its next chief executive. The board of the state owned operator of Dublin Airport and Cork Airport confirmed the appointment on 27 October 2026 after a selection process the company described as comprehensive. Coleman takes up the role early in the new year on a seven year term.
He replaces Kenny Jacobs, who stepped down earlier this year after a protracted dispute with the company. Jacobs had been suspended from his position, and the matter ran for nine months before it was settled, at a reported cost of about 480,000 euro. It was one of the more contentious corporate governance rows in the Irish semi state sector in recent years, and it left the airports operator without a permanent chief for the better part of a year.
Gary Owens, chairman of daa, said the board was delighted with the appointment following a rigorous search, and pointed to Coleman's record of engaging with commercial organisations on behalf of the Irish state and his experience of complex planning and regulatory systems. Transport Minister Darragh O'Brien welcomed the appointment, saying Coleman's experience would be key in leading the company at a challenging time and would support the longer term infrastructure development the Irish economy depends on. Coleman said he was honoured and excited to join daa at an important point in its journey.
Coleman is a chartered accountant and a graduate of University College Dublin. He has run the Land Development Agency since it was established in 2018, building the state backed affordable housing developer from a concept into one of the country's principal housing delivery organisations, with more than 300 staff and 8.75 billion euro of capital capacity. Before that he spent eight years at the National Asset Management Agency, which he joined in 2011 and where he rose to chief financial officer, working through Ireland's property based financial crisis resolution.
daa is larger than its two Irish airports. It runs global airport retailing through Aer Rianta International and sells aviation consultancy and investment services through daa International, with business interests across 15 countries. The group reported record performance over the past year and remains a strategically significant state owned enterprise for Irish connectivity. Nick Cole, deputy chief executive since late 2025 and chief executive of daa International, has provided operational continuity since Jacobs left and continues in that role.
The choice says something about what the board thinks the job now is. Jacobs, a former Ryanair executive, pursued an assertive commercial growth strategy that ran into sustained regulatory and community opposition, above all over the passenger cap at Dublin Airport, which has become the single largest constraint on the group's plans. Coleman's career has been spent on the other side of that problem: assembling land, moving schemes through planning, and negotiating with county councils, planners and government departments on behalf of the state.
That is a deliberate shift from commercial aggression toward stakeholder management, and it is a reasonable reading of where the binding constraint actually sits. The risk in it is the mirror image: an operator chosen for its planning fluency has still to run an airport business with an aggressive low cost airline as its largest customer, a retail and international arm that competes on commercial terms, and a cost base that does not soften because the planning conversation improves. A seven year term is long enough for both halves of that to be tested.
