Airport operator DAA wants the Government to intervene in the row over the cap on passenger numbers at Ireland’s main aviation hub, saying Ministers should bring public bodies together to settle the matter.
Basil Geoghegan, DAA chairman, made the call with Dublin Airport on course to breach planning restrictions this winter by exceeding the annual 32 million limit on passengers.
“I think the Government could align its resources together to get to a solution faster,” he told The Irish Times. “I don’t think there’s bad actors involved here, but I think there’s kind of just a level of inertia and inactivity in the system which gets you to a bad place.
“I’m saying that the Government knows what its policy is and it has all the levers to direct that policy and we’ll give them our view. But ultimately they’ve got to pull the levers.”
Mr Geoghegan said Dublin will cater for 1.3 million fewer passengers next year than it would if the cap were lifted, foregoing “over €10 million of revenue”.
DAA applied last December to Fingal County Council to raise the cap to 40 million as part of a €1.5 billion infrastructure plan, but the council is far from a decision.
Mr Geoghegan rejected claims from Minister for Tourism Catherine Martin that the airport operator could have applied sooner to the local authority, saying DAA pushed to raise the cap in 2019 but was stalled by delays over noise regulation for the second Dublin runway.
“It’s not our fault for applying on time because we applied five years ago,” he said. “If there was a mistake that we made it’s perhaps we should have challenged the planning authorities when they said they could only look at one planning permission at a time. But we are equally encouraged by Government not to be taking judicial review and court cases against other parts of the State. That is frowned upon.”
Although DAA has now asked Fingal and a body known as the Aircraft Noise Competent Authority to find a way of reviewing “just the passenger cap rather than anything else” in the infrastructure plan, Mr Geoghegan said that was problematic.
He said DAA wanted special measures in new planning laws to allow it bypass Fingal with direct applications to An Bord Pleanála, but the Government refused.
“I do believe that the current planning Bill is an opportunity lost,” Mr Geoghegan said. “We wanted to go to someone who is able to look at this in the national interest concurrent with taking into account all the local interests, but concurrent with Government policy. I would say that the more you silo decision-making, the more difficult decision-making is.”
The breach of the cap prompted flight curbs from the Irish Aviation Authority. The curbs are under High Court challenge from airlines and a “last-resort” DAA action.
Mr Geoghegan said the curbs may come under a European legal challenge because they could breach the open-skies deal that opens transatlantic routes to US and EU airlines.
