Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I attended a local meeting recently with people who live close to the airport flight path north of the Navan Road. It included some people who worked in the airport and had a lot of experience in relation to noise. As one might expect, they are aghast at Deputy Ross's arrangement, as Minister, to make Fingal County Council the regulator for noise. Not only that, confirming what my colleague, Deputy Brendan Ryan stated, people working in the airport were aware of various mitigation factors that may be taken, which could significantly reduce, if not substantially eliminate, much of the noise. One should bear in mind that the biggest problems that people have are the extension and increase in the number of late-night flights and early-morning flights. It is one matter to have flights during the day but it is another matter, in terms of the health effects that Deputy Brendan Ryan has raised, to have them during the night and very early in the morning when people are still trying to sleep.

I fail to understand why the Minister is not taking a more modern approach to this but instead makes a regulator of the planning authority, which, understandably, like everybody, has a vested interest in the economic success of the airport, the maintenance of jobs and the maintenance of tourism, etc. Many of us have been members of Fingal County Council and we are familiar with this. However, we are also aware - this is what the Minister does not seem to appreciate - of the downside on people's lives in two particular cases, where their houses are badly insulated because they were not built to modern insulation standards and where there is a creeping demand to expand the number and volume of flights at sleeping times. The latter noise is the most disastrous for health where families, including children, end up without being able to get proper sleep. We are talking almost exclusively about family homes in these areas.

On the WHO guidelines on noise, it is not an area that Ireland has felt it particularly necessary to legislate for but we should do it now to the best standards. Somebody such as the Minister should establish what is the lived experience of communities in the areas directly affected by the noise in order that we can work to minimise the noise. Many of the people at the meeting I attended were confident that much could be done through the use of modern technologies, including flight behaviours, flight lines and flight paths, if approached in a way designed to minimise noise. People have experience of that. Flying in and out of other European airports where that is the approach, there is relatively little noise even though aircraft may be close to populated areas.

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