Darragh O’Brien falls into the urgency trap at Dublin Airport

The Minister for Transport, Darragh O’Brien, is contemplating overriding the planning system to get around the cap on passenger numbers at Dublin Airport. It has been reported that O’Brien has been told by the attorney general, Rossa Fanning, that the Government could potentially pass a law exempting the cap from planning and presumably handing it over to some other body.

The cap currently falls into the bailiwick of Fingal County Council, which set it at 32 million passengers a year in 2007 when it granted permission for the airport’s expansion. It is currently suspended pending the outcome of lengthy litigation by several airlines and passenger numbers are expected to exceed 35.6 this year and 37 million next year.

The legislation apparently being considered by the Government would effectively sidestep the planning process and associated litigation that could take until 2028 to resolve. Why the Government is prepared to intervene in such a drastic fashion at Dublin Airport but not for other critical infrastructure projects is an interesting point. More of that later.

There is no doubt that the passenger cap issue is urgent. This week O’Brien is due to meet airline representatives to discuss it, including Airlines for America (A4A) which, as the name suggests, speaks for US airlines.

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They are vehemently opposed to the cap which they feel limits their ability to access the European market and may be in breach of the European Union-North American air travel agreement.

The risk – as the Government sees it – is that the cap gets caught up in the almost inevitable tariff and trade war between the EU and the United States which is expected to kick off in earnest this week. This possibility allows the Government to play – with some justification – what amounts to its get-out-of-jail card when it comes to any economic decision; namely that something is an impediment to foreign direct investment.

There is another clear and present danger to leaving the cap in place: the slowly imploding tourism industry. The most recent figures from the Central Statistics Office show that tourist numbers fell 30 per cent year on year in February, costing the sector €88 million.

The Irish Tourism Industry Confederation has noted that the sector is increasingly dependent on high-spending visitors from North America. They calculate that a visitor from across the Atlantic spent an average of €1,526 each on their holiday here compared with €509 for visitors from Britain

It is a big problem. Tourism is Ireland’s largest indigenous industry and biggest employer, with 257,900 people working in the sector. Last year it was worth €6.2 billion in terms of revenue from overseas tourists.

But the reality is that fewer tourists are coming, and they are staying for a shorter time, with the number of bed nights down 3 per cent last year. The reason is because Ireland is expensive for what it is compared with elsewhere in Europe. Inflation may have abated over the last 12 months, but the damage has been done in terms of value for money.

Lifting the cap on passengers at Dublin Airport will not do anything to reduce costs but it will bring more tourists from North America, who are basically the only people who find Ireland affordable.

The Irish Tourism Industry Confederation has noted that the sector is increasingly dependent on high-spending visitors from North America. They calculate that a visitor from across the Atlantic spent an average of €1,526 each on their holiday here compared with €509 for visitors from Britain.

It is a compelling argument. The 1.44 million North Americans who travelled here last year were worth €2.2 billion while 2.44 million visitors from Britain were worth €1.2 billion.

But the question still remains as to why the Government can be galvanised into radical action over the Dublin Airport cap – to the extent that it would consider passing a law to circumvent the planning system – when it is not prepared to countenance some similar action regarding the housing crisis which, hands down, must be the most serious problem facing the State.

The same goes for water and electricity infrastructure. Why not bypass the obstacles facing critical energy projects, such as offshore wind farms or the long talked about pipeline to extract water from the Shannon for the Dublin region?

It is worth noting that the precedent for what is being contemplated with respect to the Dublin Airport cap was legislation introduced in 2022 that disapplied planning laws to the construction of emergency power generation facilities as the State faced the non-trivial risk of blackouts.

The explanation would appear to be what psychologists term the mere urgency effect or the urgency trap, which is the all too human tendency to pursue urgent tasks over important ones even though they offer a better long-term pay-off.

Or as Dwight D Eisenhower, the second World War general turned US president put it: “I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.”

The urgency trap would appear to be playing out on a national level. It is in reality a problem that faces all governments that are elected democratically with relatively short, fixed terms.

But how much worse does the housing shortage and some other problems facing Ireland have to get before they are deemed urgent enough for the Government to throw out the rule book?