James Lawless (Kildare North, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

There is a lot there. I will probably not respond to all of it in detail but I noted what the Chair said and hear exactly the points he is making.

I will make a couple of comments. I have visited the communities around the airport. I have sat in houses in St. Margaret's and areas that are very much affected. I am not sure I was in the exact school mentioned but I certainly was in, or passed, a school very close to it, when I was in St. Margaret's. I have heard for myself the aircraft overhead. It is a complex issue. I welcome and agree with the comments that oversimplification of it by some actors has been unhelpful to the process. There are a lot of moving parts in terms of the systems and the different decisions. We have a noise quota system monitored by ANCA, which is a subagency of Fingal County Council. A decision on night flights was made recently, which is now under consideration by An Bord Pleanála. These are before we even get near the cap. These are separate decisions that have serious implications for all of those.

A strategic infrastructure concept is outlined in legislation. When they were drafted in the early noughties, the planning and development Acts included a number of different types of projects designated as strategic infrastructure, which meant they could bypass the normal local authority planning process. Dublin Airport was one of those until 2019, when the then Minister, Shane Ross, moved it back to Fingal County Council. That was done for a variety of reasons. It was primarily to allow for a noise agency to consider noise applications and have a court of appeal, going back to An Bord Pleanála as a second-level appeals body. One could debate whether that was the right call at the time. People make decisions at the time for various reasons and with various advices. It strikes me, and has often struck me, that perhaps it would have been better remaining within strategic infrastructure or some new version of that.

Having said that, it is important to put on the record that Fingal County Council, in my experience, has not delayed or contributed to delays at all. It has moved very rapidly when it has been put to it.