Local residents opposing Dublin Airport expansion are up against a wealthy industry with global influence

Serena Taylor’s desk is layered with unruly piles of documents, many of them related to her fight against Dublin Airport operator DAA.

She and her family live about 6km north-west of the airport, as the crow flies. They’ve a house where they raise their four kids – aged 4 to 14 – and a farm where her husband Jim Isdale grows wheat and sheep.

“My family’s family has been here since before the airport ever was,” says Isdale, pacing and talking on the other side of the desk from where Taylor is sitting.

He says he built the house out in this peaceful spot a few minutes down a lane from the R135 to raise the kids. There’s an amazing treehouse in the back garden overlooking fields that stretch far into the distance.

But in August 2022, the airport’s new north runway entered operation. All of a sudden, one morning as Taylor was brushing her teeth, she heard a roar – and went out into the garden to see what it was.

“I will never forget it. The plane was so low I thought it was about to crash,” she says, late Monday morning, seated at her desk.

Since then, she has been immersed in Dublin Airport-related issues: looking into planning applications, flight paths, noise, impacts on the environment and on people’s health – and DAA’s recent application to expand the airport and increase the number of passengers going to and from it from 32 million a year to 40 million a year.

She’s linked in with local residents’ groups, but mostly it’s a pretty lonely fight, against a formidable array of adversaries, she says. “The big powerful boys are really almost too powerful to go up against.”

Niamh Maher, who’s on the committee of St Margaret’s The Ward Residents Association, said similar by phone on 29 February. “It’s basically we’re the little people and they’re the big people and the big people normally win.”

Lined up on the other side are DAA, Irish business and tourism organisations, airlines from all over the world, aviation industry trade groups, and Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, who has backed the expansion – among others.

The aviation industry, which spans the globe, has vast resources and deep connections to call upon when fighting efforts to restrain its growth, as demonstrated recently when the Netherlands’ Schiphol Airport tried to reduce flights.

Among other pressures the industry applied, US-based airlines complained to the US government, which contacted the European Commission, which expressed concerns to the Dutch government – and in November the flight reduction was put on hold.

In December, Willie Walsh, the director general of the International Air Transport Association (AITA), said he hoped other countries would learn from what happened in Amsterdam, according to reporting by aviation industry news site FlightGlobal.

“I’m hopeful … we won’t see other governments embarrassing themselves by reaching for solutions they think will be popular but which fail to fulfil the legal obligations that they have,” Walsh reportedly said in Geneva on 6 December.

The case of Schiphol

The Amsterdam airport has long had a cap on the number of flights coming in and out, says Maurice van Uden, of Schiphol Watch, a foundation that opposes further growth of Schiphol.

The way that van Uden, a member of Schiphol Watch’s board tells it, residents around the airport more concerned about noise, and organisations like Greenpeace more focused on the environment, linked up and brought a series of lawsuits.

“In view of those cases, the authorities decided to reduce flights, basically to avoid further reductions from a judge,” he says.

In 2022, the Dutch government “decided to prioritise tackling noise nuisance, while ensuring the airport can continue to fulfil its economic role”, by limiting flight movements to a maximum of 460,000 a year, says a statement on its website.

This would be a reduction from 500,000 a year, a statement on Schiphol Airport’s website noted.

But the aviation industry fought back. It went to court in the Netherlands. It also went and complained to the US government.

The trade group Airlines for America (A4A), and the US-based airline JetBlue, filed complaints with the US Department of Transportation, against the Netherlands and the EU, under the International Air Transportation Fair Competitive Practices Act.

“If the Schiphol Capacity Declaration is issued and limits operations to 460,000 aircraft movements, the reduction of aircraft movements will further restrict A4A’s members’ ability to serve AMS [Schiphol], participate in the U.S.-Netherlands air transport market, and connect their customers to key markets beyond AMS,” A4A’s said.

The US Department of Transportation (DOT) exchanged letters with the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure about the issue, according to a US DOT document approving the complaints. “Department leadership and staff have also engaged Dutch and European officials in a variety of meetings and settings.”

The US DOT found that the Netherlands was “in violation of the U.S. EU Air Transport Agreement”. They demanded that Dutch airlines KLM, Martinair, and TUI “file schedules for their services to and from the United States”. “We will defer for now a decision on further countermeasures,” the document says.

It wasn’t only the US expressing concern, either, Dutch transport minister Mark Harbers told the House of Representatives in a 14 November letter. Canada and other countries also weighed in, he wrote.

“In addition, a letter was received from the European Commission,” Harbers wrote, “in which serious concerns are conveyed … In this letter it is stated that the European Commission expressly reserves the right to initiate infringement proceedings against the Netherlands.”

So the Dutch cabinet decided to suspend its effort to reduce the number of flights at Schiphol. In his letter, Harbers called this “a bitter pill”.

The effort may not be dead, but the industry’s pushback has at least slowed it down.

It was about three weeks after Harbers letter that IATA director general Willie Walsh made his remarks in Geneva, reported in the FlightGlobal article, “Walsh takes heart from united front in countering Schiphol capacity cuts”.

“I think what was encouraging from an industry point of view is that everybody in the industry opposed what was happening,” Walsh reportedly said.

Communities all over the world are campaigning against airport expansions, says Hannah Lawrence, a spokesperson for Stay Grounded, a network for more than 200 such initiatives around the world.

In the view of van Udon, the Schiphol Watch board member, the Amsterdam airport is on the leading edge of this movement, a test case, in a way.

“The whole aviation sector worldwide is looking at what happens at Schiphol,” he says. “They are afraid that this will spread and hurt their business.”

Dublin Airport

It is in this global context that DAA, just before Christmas, applied to Fingal County Council for planning permission to expand its facilities – and raise its passenger cap.

It is also in this context that Taylor and Isdale, watching the jets roar low over their farm and their treehouse in Meath, decided to start fighting DAA. And that Maher, over in St Margaret’s, closer to the airport, is working to hold DAA to account, she says.

DAA has been making a case publicly that the airport expansion is critical to the country’s economy. And it has been lobbying local and national government on its priorities.

Airlines have been weighing in too. Aer Lingus CEO Lynne Embleton had an op-ed in the Irish Times in January, arguing for the passenger cap to be raised “urgently”.

Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary called Transport Minister Eamon Ryan, a Green Party TD, and his party colleague Tourism Minister Catherine Martin, “dunces” and said they should leave politics if they don’t remove the passenger cap at Dublin Airport.

China’s Hainan Airlines submitted a letter in support of DAA’s planning application, as did Qatar Airways – and so did JetBlue and Airlines for America, which complained to Washington about Schiphol’s attempt to reduce flight numbers.

The International Air Transport Association has not replied to a query sent 21 February or a follow-up sent 29 February on whether, if DAA’s application to raise the passenger cap at Dublin Airport is rejected, a united front of aviation-industry groups is likely to apply pressure to try to change minds.

A spokesperson for Airlines for America did not respond directly to a query as to whether, if the passenger cap isn’t raised at Dublin Airport, it would complain to the US Department of Transportation, as it had in relation to Schiphol.

The US Department of Transportation declined to comment, when asked whether the US has a view on whether Dublin Airport’s passenger cap should be raised – and whether Ireland might face any negative impacts if it isn’t.

However, a spokesperson for the EU Commission said, on 26 February, that the US had not raised Dublin airport in the context of the EU-US Air Transport Agreement.

And a spokesperson for the Irish Department of Transport said, on 23 February, that it “has not been contacted by the US Government or any of its Departments or by the European Commision in relation to the planning condition which effectively imposes a cap of 32m on passengers at Dublin Airport”.

Furthermore, “The Department is not aware of any threat of legal action against the State by any industry group or airline in this regard,” the spokesperson said.

Fighting

Taylor says the flights over her house are ruining her family’s quality of life and damaging their health.

The number of people significantly impacted by airport noise fell by almost 50 percent between 2019 and 2022, a DAA spokesperson said Tuesday.

That’s because modern planes are quieter, and the opening of the North Runway means planes aren’t flying as often over densely populated places like Sword and Santry, he said.

However, DAA “recognises that this does not lessen noise impacts for all its closest of neighbours and has restated its commitment to reducing the impact further”.

Flights over Taylor’s house are already so frequent that she says she cannot imagine what it would be like if the passenger cap were raised and the number of flights increased.

“We’ll be bombarded,” she says. “I’ll have to leave home.”

“I’m farming out there and I am under that listening to that all day long and on top of that I’m breathing in the fine particles,” Isdale says.

Long-term exposure to ultra-fine particles from aviation around Schiphol Airport “may possibly have an effect on the cardiovascular system”, according to a 2022 paper from the Dutch government’s National Institute for Public Health and the Environment.

“Furthermore, exposure of pregnant women to ultrafine particles may possibly have a detrimental effect on the development of unborn children,” it says. “We speak of possibly because there is too much uncertainty to conclude that there is a causal relation.”

Previous research has shown that short-term exposure “can aggravate existing respiratory diseases”, the Dutch government paper says. “At the time, it was found that children suffered from more respiratory symptoms, such as shortness of breath and wheezing, on days with high concentrations of ultrafine particles.”

Aside from the noise, and their health concerns, Taylor points out that if the expansion is approved, it will mean more greenhouse gas emissions from the airport.

“We are in a climate emergency,” she says. “I think we should not be talking about raising the [passenger] cap, but about reducing it.”

DAA is taking steps to reduce carbon emissions from the airport buildings themselves, and from surface travel to and from it. But most of the carbon emissions associated with the airport are from the planes coming and going.

The aviation industry says it plans to make flying less dirty in future with more fuel-efficient planes and a shift to “sustainable aviation fuels” (SAFs). Documents DAA submitted to Fingal County Council along with its planning application say they expect per-flight emissions to fall in the coming years due to these changes.

But adding more flights and millions more passengers will blunt the beneficial impacts of that progress, DAA’s planning application shows. There’ll be more emissions associated with the airport and its flights to bring back down through all these efficiency measures.

Over in St Margaret’s meanwhile, Maher says she’s focusing on pushing the airport to comply with the conditions of its planning permissions. “They’re trying to do whatever they want to do and you can’t do that. It’s 2024,” she says.

Multiple people submitted complaints that Dublin Airport has already topped the current cap of 32 million passengers per year, Maher says. They all got a letter late last month from Fingal County Council saying it is investigating.

DAA got a letter from Fingal County Council “seeking clarity on Dublin Airport’s passenger numbers in 2023”, a DAA spokesperson said Tuesday. “A total of 31.908 million passengers passed through the terminals of Dublin Airport last year,” he said.

Maher says when it comes to the proposed expansion of the airport and increase in the passenger cap, “There is massive pressure from the airlines. If you go against this you’re damaging the economy.”

So her attitude, she says, is “Yeah fine, do your expansion but do it properly.”

That would mean taking more account of the people living around the airport. “We’re trying to challenge them, but it’s very hard. The whole country is saying, ‘Pass this planning application.’”

“People get worn down, they get bought out or they move away,” Maher says.