Some residents of Dublin 15 have welcomed news of drone delivery operator Manna’s “strategic pause” on its Irish operations, with noise complaints and concerns around privacy central to local discontent around the service.
“They fly right over our back garden,” says Paul Bohan, who lives with his wife Sharon in Coolmine. Last Saturday, the couple’s son visited from Belfast alongside his young daughter. Plans to stage a barbecue in said garden had to be abandoned.
“They were just back and forward,” Sharon says of the drones. “You were waiting for them to come back again. It’s absolutely disgraceful that they were let do it. It’s like a tractor going over your head … Since they’re gone, I just feel peace.”
“Where we live, it seemed to be nonstop over our house,” Paul adds. “It’s very invasive, I felt.”
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In a statement announcing its strategic pause on Friday, Manna cited “the absence of a clear national policy framework” and said the sector’s reliance on local planning processes “created uncertainty around the infrastructure required to support drone delivery at scale”.
The company, founded by Irish tech entrepreneur Bobby Healy, says that over the past seven years, it has completed more than 300,000 deliveries in Ireland, with more than 90,000 of them in Dublin 15 alone.
Eddie Matthews, who lives in Summerfield Green, Blanchardstown, says he took very little notice of the drones when they started operating in the area. “It got more incessant because the flight path goes over the back of my house and the back of the house in front of me,” he says.
Vulnerable people in the area, Matthews says, can be the worst affected by the drones, with the noise and unpredictability of their intrusions causing anxiety. He is pleased but “not ecstatic” about the news of the company pausing its operations.
“I’m not anti-progress. And I worked in the health service for 40 years, so I can see the benefits which these could have in a non-commercial sense, but I’m happy from a point of view of comfort and peace and quiet that they’re not operating,” Matthews says.
Jamie Ivory and Chloe Lawlor sleep in a converted attic loft in Blanchardstown, where Ivory says the “whirring of the blade is extremely loud”. It sets dogs off in the neighbourhood as well, Lawlor adds. Despite these misgivings, Ivory concedes that the drones seem “fairly popular”.
“Judging by the amount of drones that are going by daily, I’d say a lot of people liked it ... But on the other hand, a lot of people disliked it,” he says.
Over the past 18 months, a group of local residents in the area have been campaigning under the name Drone Action D15. Michael Dooley, who lives in Blanchardstown, is a member of the group and says that a “huge amount of people” are against drones being operated in his community.
“They fly over my house all the time,” Dooley says. “The people who are unfortunate to live near any of the drone bases get a huge amount of drone flights going over their houses. A drone that flies at 65m is very tonal. The characteristics are very clear.
“You’ll hear them coming, you’ll hear them passing over and you’ll hear them going away. It’s a very, very noticeable noise. When they hover to deliver … 15m above the ground, you couldn’t speak; it’s that loud.”
Dooley says that when Manna began operating in Dublin 15, they did not consult enough with local communities to assess any concerns. The company disputes this, arguing it offered to attend and engage with the group at a meeting in the office of Ruth Coppinger TD, who has supported Drone Action D15 and described Manna’s pause on operations as a “victory for communities over big tech”.
A Manna spokesperson says the company “spoke at Fingal County Council meetings, briefed elected representatives, held public meetings at our base, Castleknock Tennis Club and Blanchardstown Centre, and made ourselves available to answer questions”.
Dooley says that Manna’s operations had “effectively [taken] control of the skies in Dublin 15”, so much so that other commercial drone operators have found it more difficult to work in the area. One of those is Fergal McCarthy, the founder of aerial services provider Drone Services Ireland.
“The impact that we would have in Blanchardstown would generally be construction sites and roof inspections and that type of work,” McCarthy says.
Before Manna set up in the area, according to McCarthy, an “amber zone” existed for drone operators, meaning they could fly up to 30m above ground level. Manna’s arrival meant commercial and hobbyist drone operators alike would have to apply to Airnav Ireland, an air traffic control agency, for flight permission, where previously none was needed, complicating small-scale use of the technology.
Dooley says Drone Action D15 “were never, and are not, against the use of drones for building surveying or professional drone users. It’s the normalisation of putting traffic into the air above your back garden, rather than being delivered to your front door,” he says.
In a statement, Manna said its focus “is currently on supporting its staff, customers and the more than 120 Irish businesses that are partnered with the service, while continuing to invest in its international expansion”.
The company said that public support for its service is “significant”, with “hundreds of customers” contacting local representatives in support of drone delivery in September 2025, followed by “more than 1,100 Dublin 15 residents doing so again in November ... More than 6,000 people also signed a petition supporting the expansion of drone delivery in Dublin.”
The statement continued: “The service is particularly popular with working parents, young families, people working from home and those with mobility challenges ... As with any frontier technology, there are genuine questions and concerns that deserve open debate and Manna consistently sought to engage with residents who held those concerns.”
