Flying drones are delivering food in Dublin, so where are companies allowed to build drone bases?

At the Clonsilla Inn, in Dublin 15, there’s a sign for Hosted Kitchens featuring Mr Beast Burger, Gochu Korean street food, Madame Monsieur and others.

Hosted Kitchens runs “dark” kitchens, making food for delivery. Across the car park is a new base set up by the company Manna, from which its drones can take off to fly food orders to customers.

Madame Monsieur’s Instagram profile says “Takeway on Hosted Kitchens”, “Manna Drone Delivery”.

On Friday, about 11am, there was no one at the Hosted Kitchens, or at the Manna drone base, which is not up and running yet, Manna CEO Bobby Healy says.

At the door of her home across Clonsilla Road, in a residential area, Mairead Kenny said she didn’t know a new drone base had been built less than 100m from her house.

“Absolutely no awareness, the community were not informed about this,” Kenny said. “I should have been able to get onto my councillor to say I opposed this, or go to a meeting to learn more about it and say what I think.”

Two kilometres up the road, at an operating Manna drone base outside the McDonald’s at the Blanchardstown shopping centre on Friday, there were drones on the launch pads about lunch time.

When they started buzzing from here to homes around Dublin 15 in February, delivering food from the sky to hungry people like something from science fiction, residents were caught by surprise – and complained that they were very noisy.

There’s at least one more drone base coming to the area too, Healy, Manna’s CEO, said on Monday via direct message on X. “We will announce a new d15 location very soon.”

While Manna is only delivering in Dublin 15 at the moment, in Ireland, the drone delivery industry is expanding fast.

“In a short space of time, you’re going to see drones all over the skies,” said independent Councillor Mannix Flynn, who sits on Dublin City Council.

“There will come a day when they’re in everyone’s sky,” said Labour Councillor Mary McCamley, who sits on Fingal County Council.

The company that operates the drones, Manna, has a licence from the Irish Aviation Administration (IAA) to do so.

But the Fingal and Dublin City Council development plans, massive documents councils publish every few years saying what kinds of things can be built where, don’t say where companies can build drone bases and where they can’t.

That’s something McCamley says needs to change. She said Monday by text that she’d proposed a motion to update the Fingal development plan to deal with drones.

Councillors also say companies like Manna should have to apply for planning permission to set up drone bases, so people in the area can weigh in on whether they are okay with that.

Impacts

Drones are loud, Fingal county councillors said at the May meeting of the Blanchardstown-Mulhuddart/Castleknock/Ongar Area Committee.

“It’s not a noise that goes on for a long time, but it’s very noisy,” said independent Councillor Tania Doyle. “My husband has always worked nights, if he was trying to sleep, he would be woken up.”

They are about as loud as road traffic, said Enda Walsh, the IAA’s unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) manager, at the meeting.

When Manna drones are cruising at 50m, they are about 60 decibels to people on the ground, and when they come lower for delivery, they’d be about 65 decibels, Walsh said. They do about 150 deliveries a day, he said.

For comparison, the sound of washing your hands would be about 45 decibels, and the average road noise exposure in New York would be 73 decibels, he said.

Healy, the Manna CEO, said Tuesday by WhatsApp that the IAA has now started allowing Manna drones to fly higher, at 65m. “Therefore the decibels are even lower.”

Also, Manna is “moving from an eight propeller version to a four propeller version which will have an even lower sound footprint. But that won’t be until the end of the year,” Healy said.

But it’s not just about the decibel level, says Walsh, of the IAA. “It’s also the tone. You get used to traffic noise and you start to block it out. But if you hear something different and you sort of tune into it.”

There’s research ongoing about how to build the rotors a bit differently to adjust the tone of drone noise, he said.

There are benefits to the drones as well, a spokesperson for Manna pointed out in an email on Monday.

“Delivery drones will improve urban amenity, reducing the number of loud, environmentally-unfriendly cars and trucks on the road and replacing them with far-quieter, all-electric delivery drones,” she said.

Regulating drone bases

While it decides on whether to grant licences to drone operators or not, the IAA doesn’t regulate the development of land, said Enda Walsh, the IAA’s unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) manager, at the May meeting.

Councils usually regulate the development of land, setting out a strategy in their development plan for what kind of development can go where – what areas are residential, which ones can have shops too, and all that.

Neither Dublin City Council’s development plan, nor Fingal County Council’s development plan deal with drone bases specifically, setting out where they’re allowed and where they aren’t.

However, Fingal’s does say where people can put airfields and where they can’t.

For example, for areas zoned MC, like the Blanchardstown drone base, or TC, like the Clonsilla one, the development plan includes under uses not permitted “airfield/aerodrome”.

Healy, the Manna CEO, says the drone bases like the ones they are building aren’t airfields. “Literally nobody in the aviation industry would call our bases airfields.”

In an email on Monday, a spokesperson for the company expanded on this argument.

“Our bases are not classified as an aerodrome or airfield because they require minimal infrastructure, with very small launch and landing pads (2 meter squared pads) rather than large runways or taxiways (often kilometers long),” she said.

Furthermore, “Drones also produce orders of magnitude less noise and environmental impact compared to traditional aircraft – and so it is logical that a drone launch facility has completely different permitting regulations,” she said.

There does not appear to be a definition in the Fingal County Development plan setting out what counts as an airfield.

A spokesperson for Fingal County Council has not responded to a query sent Friday as to whether the Manna drone bases count as airfields.

McCamley, the Labour councillor in Fingal, said on Monday she’d put forward a motion to update that county’s development plan for 2023 to 2029 to deal with drones.

“Just asking the CEO [of the council] to consider a variation to the Development Plan to include Drones in the zoning user chapters,” she said.

For Dublin City Council, a spokesperson said that the city’s development plan for 2022 to 2028 “does not contain specific policies relating to drones or unmanned aircraft systems”.

“Currently, it is not intended to vary the development plan to introduce specific policies relating to drones or unmanned aircraft systems,” he said.

Planning permission

Manna’s drone base in Blanchardstown is a former car park, surrounded by fences and hedges.

On it are a couple of big metal containers serving as storage/offices, and four rubber mats laid on the ground for drones to take off from and land on.

A company called Blanche Retail Nominee Limited applied in May 2023 for permission to use the area as an “aerial delivery hub with 3no. single storey office cabins (75m2) with perimeter fencing and all associated site works and services”.

It advertised the proposal in the newspaper and posted a notice on the site telling people what its plans were. In August 2023, the council granted it temporary planning permission for three years.

The drone base in Clonsilla, across the car park from the Clonsilla Inn, is also a fenced-in area, with a metal storage container, and four rubber pads for drones. On Friday, there were no people or drones visible.

For this one, there does not appear to be a planning application on Fingal County Council’s planning website.

Asked about this, Manna CEO Bobby Healy said on Tuesday by WhatsApp that “You don’t need planning permission to take off and land drones.”

“The pads are rubber mats and don’t require planning,” Healy said. “Any other structures that would require planning like we have in Blanchardstown SC [Shopping Centre] we apply for but where structures are owned by landlord or provided by landlord we obviously work within their constraints.”

On the other hand, asked whether and how planning law covers drone bases, a spokesperson for the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage said Thursday by email that “All development proposals require planning permission unless they are specifically exempted under the Planning and Development Act 2000, as amended (the Act) or supporting Regulations.”

“There are no specific exemptions in the Planning Act or supporting regulations in relation to drones,” the department spokesperson said.

In response to queries about its approach to drone bases, a spokesperson for Dublin City Council said that it had not had any planning applications for them.

Since “The Planning Legislation as existing does not currently define or set out regulations regarding the statutory planning requirements for such applications,” the Dublin City Council spokesperson said.

So “each application will therefore be considered on its own merits, on a case-by-case basis and subject to the specific site location, designations and existing land use in the vicinity”, he said.

As for the Department of Housing’s position, “The lack of a specific Exemption in the Planning Regulations does not necessarily automatically render a proposal “Development” in the first instance,” the council spokesperson said.

However, the Planning and Development Act 2000 defines “development” as “the carrying out of any works on, in, over or under land or the making of any material change in the use of any structures or other land”.

So if the department says all development proposals require planning permission unless there’s a specific exemption, and there’s no exemption relating to drones – and “development” includes a material change of use – why wasn’t planning permission required for Manna’s drone base in Clonsilla?

“Our view is that this is normal commercial use of a space that already has commercial planning approval,” said Healy, the Manna CEO. “No different than the many motorbikes and cars that do delivery in and out of a restaurant that deliveroo etc are doing.”

“If the premises is licensed for commercial deliveries of trucks and cars we are falling under same. We make less noise than them also,” he said.

If there’s no planning application, there’s no newspaper advert and no notice posted at the site to let residents like Kenny – who lives across the road from the Clonsilla Inn – know what someone’s proposing to put in their area.

“With planning permission people can put in whether they want it or not, but without that, there’s no way to object,” said McCamley, the Labour councillor. “It doesn’t seem fair, to me.”

Sinn Féin Councillor Angela Donnelly said it would seem surprising to her if drone bases didn’t need planning permission.

“In some councils you need planning permission to put up a shed for your wheelie bins,” she said. “It seems to be one rule for commercial activity and one rule for the ordinary resident.”

Independent Councillor Mannix Flynn, who is on Dublin City Council, and has taken an interest there in the development of the drone business, said Manna has “tried to bypass the system” in Fingal. “It bypasses the democratic planning process.”

In response to a series of queries on how it regulates drone bases, whether the bases in Blanchardstown and Clonsilla are airfields, and the department’s position on planning permission for drone bases, a spokesperson for Fingal County Council pointed to the planning permission for the base in Blanchardstown.

Donnelly, the Sinn Féin councillor, who lives near the Blanchardstown drone airport, says that because the drone delivery business is “so new, I don’t think the law has caught up with it yet”.

The IAA and others are working on this, said Enda Walsh, of the IAA, at the May meeting.

He said the IAA, Dublin City Council, and Maynooth University are working on a project to help local authorities to start incorporating new developments with drones into their development plans.

Asked about this, a spokesperson for Dublin City Council said these partners were working together “to create a Drone Innovation Platform”.

“To gain a better understanding of the various technological, regulatory, wider-societal and innovation supports required to allow drone ecosystems and related activities that are planned for typical European City environments,” he said.