Who’d be a planning commissioner – resigned forever to being pilloried by one side of an application or another? Or in some cases, as with Dublin Airport, both.
A decision this week to allow 50 per cent more night-time flights in a shorter “night-time” window at Dublin Airport alongside a new quota system for noise seemed tailor-made for airlines that have been concerned about maintaining current levels of service at the airport, never mind expansion.
But no, they were not happy at all, at least not with the new, higher limit on flights, characterising it as a new, second, passenger cap. They are particularly concerned about limits on flights in the generally busy 5am-7am morning window.
Airlines are already fighting a separate 32-million-a-year limit on the number of passengers than can use the airport.
Both it and the now-modified night-time limit on flights date back to conditions on the original planning permission for the airport’s new north runway.
That permission dates back more than 15 years and yet in all that time no one, not the airport operator (the DAA) nor any of the airlines – especially Ryanair and Aer Lingus for which it is a critical hub – conducted a concerted campaign to address what were always likely to be severely limiting conditions.
Only when the runway opened was there any realistic effort to address the new realities of passenger and traffic numbers at the airport. And so here we are.
For their part, residents around the airport – or at least one of the residents’ associations – were also dissatisfied with the latest decision, saying it will only increase pollution and noise, making their lives more difficult.
It’s hard to see what would satisfy local residents. The airport authority is already investing millions of euro buying the worst-affected homes and funding increased noise insulation and is, in any case, restricted in its flight paths.
And the truth remains that many, if not most, of those living under those flight paths have bought their homes long after the airport was well established as Ireland’s big point of entry for air passengers.
For now, everyone is threatening to challenge the latest decision in the courts. Meanwhile, in the absence of any political leadership n the issue, the reconstituted planning appeals board, An Coimisiún Pleanála, must resign itself to the view that whatever it decides, the whole mess will be its fault.
