Roderic O'Gorman (Dublin West, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I wish the Minister of State a good afternoon. I am not sure how familiar he is with drones, but in Dublin 15 in my constituency they are something we are very familiar with at the moment. For over a year now, a commercial company called Manna Drone Delivery has been using airborne drones to deliver takeaway food to homes around Blanchardstown and Castleknock. The drone flies over and the food comes down in a brown paper bag on a string. It is literally manna from heaven. Any time people are in Dublin 15, they hear the buzz and see the drone going over and know that a punter in Clonsilla is getting his or her burrito. This is a brand new area and as with any new technology, there are benefits. However, as this delivery approach is about to spread to new areas across Dublin in the next number of weeks, there is an urgent need for airborne delivery drones to be regulated because right now, the rules about their use are really lax.

Residents across Dublin West have raised a number of issues with me. The first significant issue is noise. Drones make a very distinct sound as they travel through the air and as they rise and descend. While this noise could be tolerated maybe on a once-off basis, there are now flight paths over certain estates in Dublin 15 where in an afternoon there could be 30 or 40 drones flying over and back. I am not exaggerating; I have been there and seen that over an afternoon. That is the scale of what we are talking about. That can have a real impact on someone's enjoyment, particularly of their garden.

Safety is another issue. Right now, there is just one drone company using these airborne drones. What happens if a second or third comes in? If they are not regulated or not co-ordinated, a crash is a real possibility. These are hefty machines. If one or two came out of the sky, there could be real dangers.

Privacy is another matter. Each of these drones has a camera on it to oversee the drop of the paper bag. It is not meant to be switched on for the journey, but just when the bag is being dropped. This is a camera operated by a live pilot back at the base. Who knows if it is on or off? We do not know. These things are flying over our homes all the time with a camera, and we have no idea if that camera is on or off, so there is a real privacy concern there.

There is a planning concern as well. There are at least two drone bases where they come to and from in my constituency right now. There is no clarity in terms of whether planning permission is needed under the planning Acts.

In the Green Party's general election manifesto, we said that this is a new technology and there are real benefits, but that we need to regulate it. We called for that in our general election manifesto because right now it is wild west territory in terms of how these are used. When I put a parliamentary question to the Minister of State's colleague, the Minister of Transport, recently, he said that the Government is working on "a policy framework to guide high-level strategic planning and development of the drone sector in Ireland" and that the "framework will be published in the coming months." Can the Minister of State give me, my constituents and, indeed, people all over Dublin a clear timeline within which this policy framework is going to be published? Can he commit that it will deal with four specific issues: noise pollution, particularly for those estates that are under the flight paths of these drones; the planning status of the drone bases where these drones fly to and from; safety and the risk of drone collisions, particularly if other companies start to use similar delivery approaches; and privacy concerns around who gets to see the data from those cameras? Will the policy framework that he and probably his Department is bringing forward deal with those four crucial matters?

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