It often goes unmentioned in the telling of the Icarus legend that his father warned the foolish boy to fly neither too high nor too low. Too high and the sun would melt his wing wax. Too low and the sea would saturate his feathers or, in today’s context, shatter the mental health of the residents beneath his flight path.
Had young Icarus picked Dublin Airport for his take-off and landing he might have lived to tell the tale. For in the eyes of most north Dublin politicians, the sky there has no limit. Local TD and Minister for Transport Darragh O’Brien admitted on Drivetime that a throughput of 40 million passengers annually would not be enough. How about 60 million, Katie Hannon asked. He didn’t answer the question.
“The noise really is unbearable at times,” reported Eric, a septuagenarian from Swords, one of several callers to Liveline on Tuesday. He complained of being “woken at five o’clock in the morning” by planes taking off and unable to keep his bedroom window open at night or to hold an audible conversation in his garden.
Still the flight numbers keep on spiralling to maintain pace with the irresistible force of their value. The economy coins it. The neighbours pay the price.
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This week’s Cabinet decision to permanently abolish the passenger cap – currently 32 million-a-year – ignores the inevitability that, one of these days, Dublin Airport is going to reach breaking point. Night flight restrictions and noise pollution regulations allow for only so many hours in the day and so many planes in the air. You might think lessons had been learned from Ireland’s present infrastructural mayhem arising from the absence of forward planning. But you would be wrong. Ireland is a country forever behind its time.
Instead of providing a second airport to spread the load and the service, the State has embarked on buying the homes of affected residents. The initiative is said to mirror the decision to purchase homes on the MetroLink route, but the two schemes are incomparable. Already pricey properties in Dartmouth Square – a 42.7 sq m site at the eastern rear is currently for sale for €450,000 – will likely increase in value once MetroLink is built. Not so for houses in the airport’s vicinity, where the noise and air pollution are going to get worse. The State is buying a pig in a poke.
A Liveline caller named Caroline said she has completed the sale of her home to the DAA, the State’s operator of Dublin and Cork airports. Generations of her family had lived in the house since before the airport was built. Now, she said, it lies empty and padlocked along with other homes in the lane, all attracting antisocial behaviour.
DAA says that, so far, it has spent over €23 million on fitting houses and schools with sound insulation and buying houses outright in mitigation of the increased runway activity in Dublin. There’s a syndrome for that. It’s called penny wise and pound foolish.
When Tony Ryan, posthumously celebrated by many politicians as a man ahead of his time, advocated a second airport for Dublin 30 years ago, the existing one was catering for just eight million passengers annually. Last year, 36.4 million travellers used it. Last month alone, in winter’s moribund depths, 2.48 million people transited the country’s busiest airport; 14 per cent more than in January 2025.
Aeronautical matters were Ryan’s mastermind subject. He founded Ryanair, Europe’s biggest airline. Another of his companies, Guinness Peat Aviation, transformed Ireland into a world mecca of aviation leasing. In 1995, he submitted a detailed proposal to the Government for a second Dublin airport at the Baldonnel Air Corps base in the western reaches of the capital. It would accommodate three million passengers initially, rising to seven million as the facility developed. He planned to located Ryanair’s operations there.
Near the M50, easier to reach from regions south and west of the city than the Collinstown airport, he envisaged it as a centre for short-haul European flights. No way, Jose, responded then Minister for Transport Michael Lowry.
In the intervening years, Dublin Airport has been flying it while its neighbours have been driven indoors by jets roaring over their gardens in Swords, St Margaret’s, the Naul, Baldoyle, Portmarnock, Ratoath and Ashbourne. While road traffic congestion and associated air pollution have worsened around Collinstown, the proximity of the Luas on the Naas Road and the rapid population growth in west Dublin have strengthened the case for Baldonnel.
Objectors to a second Dublin airport argue that the city is not big enough to warrant it, but Oslo, a capital with a smaller population, has two airports in proximity to it. Ditto Stockholm with its somewhat bigger population. Dublin is heading in the same density direction, but without a map.
Climate defenders oppose the construction of more airports because of the detrimental emissions from aircraft. According to the European Commission, aviation is one of the fastest-growing sources of greenhouse gases. It would be marvellous if everyone stopped flying so much and but wishful thinking is not a policy. And concentrating ever-increasing health damage caused by dirty air, noise and road congestion in a corner of Dublin and Meath is not a solution.
Ireland is an island that wants to be at the centre of the economic universe. Dublin is an international travel hub situated on the edge of the Atlantic and at the entrance to the EU. The reality is that planes will continue to fly into and out of the capital. Deciding not to build another airport to protect the environment makes as little sense as hoping fruit flies will vanish if you remove the basket containing the bananas.
There is only so much sound insulation residents in Dublin’s flight paths can pack into their homes before they are forced to quit and hand over the keys. The future of aviation is not its obliteration. It is technological advancement in rendering planes quieter, cleaner and more fuel-efficient. As Dublin still awaits the rail link to the airport first proposed a quarter of a century ago, there is an obvious drawback in planning for that future.
It requires forward thinking.
