When speaking to Newstalk Breakfast in February of this year Ryanair chief executive, Michael O'Leary was quizzed over the possible sale of Aer Lingus to IAG - during the interview he offered his assessment of Ireland's air travel industry:

"Ireland has two airlines, one carries 100 million passengers - and is growing strongly. The other carries less than 10 million passengers - and is going nowhere."

New passenger figures released by Ryanair and Aer Lingus in the last 24 hours serve as a reminder of the gap that has developed between Ireland's two airlines.

In March Ryanair carried 6.67m customers - this compares with the Aer Lingus figure of 815,000.

Ryanair's load factor, the percentage of seats filled on each flight, was 90 percent during the month - this was a 10 percent bump over last year, while Aer Lingus filled 79.1 percent of its seats.

Both airlines are growing - Aer Lingus traffic was up by 2.3 percent on the same period in 2014 - while Ryanair's grew by 28 percent.

The Aer Lingus figures show a split between its long haul and short haul performance. Long haul traffic increased by 25.3 percent to 94,000 passengers in March compared to 75,000 passengers for the same month in 2014 - but short haul passenger numbers were down, from 628,000 in March of last year, to 625,000 in March 2015.

Ryanair hopes to carry 100m passengers during its financial year - yesterday's figures pushed its share price to over €11.