Dublin Airport applies to increase passenger cap to 40m annually

The Daa wants a cap of 32m passengers a year on the country’s busiest airport lifted.

Dublin Airport has applied for permission to increase passenger capacity from 32m to 40m a year.

It comes as data shows numbers in Irish airports were 18% higher in the second quarter of this year compared to 2022.

Fingal County Council said the application from the Daa, operator of Dublin and Cork Airports, is “an application of significant scale and complexity” involving “a 15-year permission to build a suite of 11 distinct infrastructure projects”.

The Daa wants a cap of 32m passengers a year on the country’s busiest airport lifted.

The cap was a condition of planning permission when Terminal 2 was greenlit 15 years ago.

The Daa says it will have to reduce the number of flights out of Dublin in order to stay within the cap, which it claims will affect the economy and connectivity to and from Ireland.

Fingal County Council said that the infrastructure projects in the Daa application “include the expansion of the North and South Aprons to accommodate extra aircraft and the expansion of the check-in and passenger services area within Terminal 1 which includes the relocation of the existing security area”.

There are also three infrastructure projects on the airfield and five relating to airport access and parking.

The move comes as the CSO said over 1.6m more passengers used Irish airports in April, May, and June of 2023 when compared with the same three months last year.

Aviation provides a headache for world leaders as they try to balance the desire to grow passenger numbers in their respective countries with their own climate targets.

Aviation was responsible for 2% of global energy-related carbon emissions last year, having grown faster in recent decades than rail, road, or shipping, said the International Energy Agency.

Sustainability and aviation globally cannot currently be reconciled because of the intense carbon nature of flying, according to experts.

However, the Daa has insisted that there is significant sustainability plans within its application to increase the annual cap on passengers from 32m to 40m.