Dublin Airport (Passenger Capacity) Bill 2026: Second Stage Dail Éireann — 2026-06-23 ============================================================ Richard O'Donoghue (II), Limerick County Thank you very much. To get back to Dublin Airport, I am delighted the airport is doing well but as regards climate emissions, the climate action Bill was supported by the Deputies on my right. They brought in that Bill. Where are most of the people who are landing here going? They are not staying around Dublin, are they? They are travelling throughout the country. Where are the carbon emissions when the Government is talking about that? What about the cost of fuel, which it wants to increase by 32 cent per litre? Where is the Government going with this? On the one hand, it talks about carbon emissions, while, on the other, it wants to expand Dublin Airport, which is 6 million passengers over quota. Why did it not look at Shannon Airport, which could add another 2.5 million passengers without any infrastructural change? Why did it not look at Cork Airport? Why do people have to travel from all different parts of the country to come to Dublin? It is because they cannot get connecting flights due to the monopoly in Dublin. The people who live around Dublin Airport are all complaining about noise pollution and traffic congestion caused by people trying to get to the airport. What do the Dublin TDs say? Let us make Dublin more congested, they say, and stop any person coming home to Dublin to live with their parents or grandparents. Let us stop them because we are going to make sure we have all our eggs in one basket. Ireland should be the basket where everything is shared, rather than just looking to Dublin. I have brought this issue up more times, even in the convention centre. When I was in the Central Bank today, I said we were in the convention centre for a year. I brought the issue up that time when the former Minister, Eamon Ryan, was talking out of both sides of his mouth about carbon tax. What is the Government doing? It is stopping people coming home by overdeveloping Dublin and not looking after the rest of the country. This all comes back to carbon tax. The Government will take more and more carbon tax and stop families from looking after their young ones and building their own houses. It will stop infrastructure in this country because of inflation, all of which has been brought on by the carbon tax, but it has no problem in letting buses and trucks travel from the port in Dublin. Of the passengers coming into this country, 83% travel down the country. I would welcome them to Limerick but they could have landed in Shannon Airport and come into Limerick or gone to Kerry, Cork or Galway. They could land anywhere in the country and we would divide up the carbon emissions, but, no, the Government just wants to extend one place. It wants to put suffering on the people of Dublin, whose families cannot come home, and build houses in this area because it is overpopulated. The rest of the country is crying out for business, including the other airports. The Government could expand Knock airport or Kerry airport, which would lower emissions. As for most of the targets, we see all the buses travelling down west on day trips before heading back up to Dublin again. All of it is down to carbon emissions, which the Government says it is trying to reduce, but, at the same time, it is trying to accelerate them. Where is the Minister's explanation for that? I am all for working together but I am also for equality for the other airports, which should expand at the same time. How can they go against a monopoly that has all the connecting flights? There are only a certain number of flights out of Shannon Airport because the connecting flights leave from Dublin. That is a problem. If the Government wants to do the right thing, it should connect all of Ireland and let all the airports develop together. Then it should look at increasing the cap if the quota is too low. It should look at the issue that way. Increasing the cap in one airport while not helping the other airports and people around the country is wrong. It is not forward planning; it is Dublin planning. The Government is destroying the future of the next generation who want to come back and live in Dublin. It is destroying the lives of people who live around the airport with the extra flights that are going out. Aeroplanes taking off at Dublin Airport are supposed to bank at a certain time. Now the airport is asking how it is going to organise that. The planes are supposed to go out 3 km before they bank. Now, because there are so many flights coming in, they are banking at 1.5 km out. That means they are going over more residential areas, yet the Government wants to approve more residential building and allow more people to live there. The Government should look in the mirror when it is introducing laws because it is breaking the law. --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-06-23/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:55:06+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-06-23