Alan Farrell (Dublin Fingal, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

That is understood. I am speaking specifically about the 32 million passenger cap as imposed by the planning condition applied to the construction of terminal 2 and on the entire airport operation. My question is really simple. Mr. Jacobs has commented on this many times. He said he does not agree with what the members have put forward. He did not substantively agree or disagree with what Deputy Matthews had to say. Deputy Matthews really got the core of the issue. I have here the three-page decision of the board, which is online, which sets out under section 5 that the questions that were put to the DAA, which were referred by Fingal County Council, did not satisfy it and, therefore, it has left it to the planning authority, which is Fingal County Council, to interpret. Clearly, Fingal County Council's view is that the planning condition is 32 million until such time as it is changed. I will put a question to Mr. Jacobs. Part of the difficulty with being a representative of north County Dublin for almost 20 years, as I have been, is that when the DAA refers to itself as a good neighbour, many people in the community have a difficulty with that. They will not be swayed by the DAA's outreach programmes regardless of how many millions of euro it spends on them because it is not about that.

For them, it is about being able to sleep in their beds at night without interruption. It is about unfettered access to night flights, which I know is subject to a court action and we will not talk about that. However, that is featuring in the views of many hundreds who have communicated with Deputy Smith and me. We both represent the same communities. It is difficult to hear that the DAA is a good neighbour in the context of the feedback we get as public representatives. I have spent the past year canvassing the entirety of Swords, and the closer I got to the airport the more it came up. There were more issues with proximity noise, which obviously has an impact on passenger numbers. In Portmarnock, St. Margaret's and places like that, there is a great deal of difficulty with flights, in their view, deviating from flight paths.

I will be quick. I know the DAA does not manage the skies, but it is their airport. In recent months, for instance, there has been a 3% deviation from south runway, the original runway, over Portmarnock on departures over the Irish Sea. There was a 90° variation, among other things, over the past few days.