Updated / Tuesday, 23 Jun 2026 21:57
Ryanair has condemned an arson attack on a number of properties housing its staff in Swords in Dublin overnight.
The airline said that wheelie bins were set alight and placed “immediately in front of the doors of seven properties” in the Fosterstown area.
It said that the properties were “rented and occupied by Ryanair’s Irish and EU employees… who work for Ryanair Inflight, Engineering, and in (Ryanair’s) Swords Head Office”.
The airline described the incident as a “criminal attack”.
It said it had been reported to gardaí and the airline was assisting in the investigation.
‘Very scary’, says couple who were in house during attack
A couple who were in one of the houses when it was targeted described the experience as “very scary”.
The man, who works for Ryanair, shares the house with three other Ryanair staff, but two of them are currently away on holidays. The couple did not want to be identified.
“We woke up with someone hitting the window, punching the window very hard, and suddenly we hear his housemate screaming,” the young woman said.
“We got super scared. We thought someone was in the house, and we thought they took his housemate,” she said. She described how they called the police.
“We were there for like half an hour, because we were scared to leave his room … but eventually the police told us that the whole area was secured, so we left, and we saw the bin, we smelled smoke …
“We saw the firemen, the garda, all the bins on fire, the walls completely burned, the doors completely burned. It was very, very scary, very scary … horrible,” she said.
Plywood has been used as a temporary fix for the doors of the houses damaged by fire.
“I’m gonna stay. [Ryanair] offered to move us, but I prefer to stay in my house,” the man said.
“They are going to put in some [security] cameras, they are going to prepare some security for us, so it’s going to be completely safe to stay,” he said.
“Thanks to the prompt efforts of the Dublin Fire Brigade and the garda síochána in Swords, the damage was limited to burns on the front doors of these properties in the Swords area,” a statement from airline said.
“Ryanair is one of the largest employers in the Swords area, and it’s difficult to understand what these ‘morons’ thought they would achieve by this arson attack on rental properties and our hardworking employees,” a Ryanair spokesperson said.
“None of the properties suffered serious damage, and thankfully none of Ryanair’s employees were harmed in any way although some are understandably unnerved by this senseless arson attack on the homes of hardworking young people.”
Gardaí have confirmed that they, along with emergency services, responded to reports of a number of incidents of criminal damage by fire at a domestic location in Swords in the early hours of this morning.
Gardaí said that the local fire service extinguished the fires and that no injuries were reported at the time.
