Some 16 years after Fingal County Council granted permission for a new north runway at Dublin Airport, with a restriction on night-time flights, DAA, the airport operator, is now saying publicly that the local authority should be “reasonable” about enforcing this condition given that it’s in the middle of the summer holiday season.
Only in Ireland could this happen. The restriction – which limits the number of flights to 65 from 11pm-7am – may well be “idiotic”, as Michael O’Leary of Ryanair described it in an interview with Newstalk’s Pat Kenny Show on Friday, and it could well be subject to an appeal, as Taoiseach Leo Varadkar suggested later in the day, but it was still a condition of the planning permission and should be observed by State-owned DAA.
A new regime that focuses on noise pollution rather than simply the number of flights going in and out of the airport would make sense and O’Leary’s point about aircraft being significantly quieter now than they were in 2007 has merit. DAA has applied for permission to install monitors in various locations around the Greater Dublin Area to capture the level of noise generated by modern aircraft.
Nonetheless, it is not for DAA to decide to ignore a legally binding planning permission condition even if its view is that “having a cap on the number of night flights is no longer a fit-for-purpose way of determining how many flights should operate at night time” and that a noise quota regime should be introduced. You can’t simply ignore the conditions on a planning permission that you don’t like and complain that you’ve only been given six weeks’ notice of enforcement measures being taken when the condition was laid out in 2007.
The row also highlights the issues around planning for major infrastructure projects in this country. Dublin Airport is a strategic national asset, vital to the success of our tourism industry and in providing vital air connectivity to support foreign direct investment, which underpins the success of the Irish economy. Such decisions should be made at a national level not a local one. Reform is needed.
