Daa seeks new passenger cap for Dublin Airport
Airport Dublin
The Daa has lodged a new planning application with Fingal County Council seeking the passenger limit at Dublin Airport to be raised from 32m to 36m per year.
This new proposal will now be considered in tandem with a similar application from the Daa, currently before the council, for the passenger cap to be raised to 40m people.
However, the latest request has two distinctive elements. Firstly, it stipulates that it will only come into effect “subject to a grant of planning permission for the change to permitted runway operations” contained in an application for a ‘relevant action’ which is currently before An Bord Pleanala.
The ‘relevant action’ seeks to normalise night-time flights at the airport which are currently subject to a 65-per-night limitation. The latest public consultation period for that request is due to end next week.
Secondly in the new application Daa propose that passengers who transit the airport without entering a terminal will now be counted twice.
This would bring the airport’s methodology for counting passengers in line with that considered accepted practice by An Bord Pleanala, which previously ruled in 2018 that to only count such transit passengers once would “have material planning consequences and would go beyond what was permitted in the permission granted”.
Using Daa’s method of counting passengers, Dublin Airport allegedly did not breach the 32m threshold in 2023 but in the counting methodology used by An Bord Pleanala, the limit was breached by some distance.
A spokesperson for Daa said that the previous 32 million cap had “related to the surface access and the number of passengers permitted to enter the terminals”, while the new approach will apply to all passengers, both within the terminals and without.
“This is known as ‘aviation count’ and standardises how we count passengers,” the spokesperson said.
The spokesperson added that the relevant action had been used as a caveat in the latest 36 million application as “this will bring clarity about the operating conditions” of the airport’s newest North Runway – which opened in August 2022 – and the night-time flights at the airport.