Dublin Airport (Passenger Capacity) Bill 2026: Committee and Remaining Stages Dail Éireann — 2026-06-30 ============================================================ Ciarán Ahern (LAB), Dublin South-West I move amendment No. 1: In page 6, between lines 29 and 30, to insert the following: “ “international connectivity” means the range and frequency of scheduled passenger and cargo air services operating to and from Dublin Airport, having regard to— (a) the number of direct routes available from Dublin Airport to destinations outside the State, (b) the number of carriers operating such routes, and (c) the frequency of services on those routes;”. There are a number of references to international connectivity in this Bill. I raised this on Second Stage last week and the Minister thought it was amusing that I did not understand the definition of "international connectivity". I understand a plain English reading of it but the phrase permeates the Bill and it is used by the Government as a justification for the lifting of this cap. The Government says the Bill is to increase our international connectivity. With 32 million or more flights already leaving the country to international destinations, the question is what is enough international connectivity. With amendment No. 1, I propose to insert a definition in the Bill. We are told all the time that connectivity is key to our success as a nation and that, as an island nation, we cannot leave ourselves stranded and we need international connectivity. However, it strikes me we already have quite a lot of international connectivity with 30-odd million flights going through Dublin Airport already. If we are going to increase flights on this basis, it is important we have metrics by which we can measure international connectivity and it is important to define it because the level of emissions associated with higher or lower levels of international connectivity should be determined by the metrics used. This falls under the transport brief but it has a massive climate consequence. It is worth noting that only 5% of the population of the entire world has ever taken a flight. We are in an incredibly privileged position here. This relates to climate justice and our obligations to others in a world where 95% of people on the globe have never been on a plane and the Minister is now proposing potentially to double the number of flights from Dublin Airport. Therefore, throwing around a phrase like "international connectivity" gives the Minister carte blanche to continually increase the number of people going through the airport and the number of flights being taken and that is not necessarily a good thing. We need to talk about demand management in international aviation. There is no such thing as sustainable aviation fuel. It is never going to happen and the airline industry acknowledges that, so we have to try to have some metrics for and control over the number of flights in the country. Furthermore, this is specifically for Dublin. There is no talk here about balanced regional development. This is all about Dublin Airport. The Minister talks about sustainable development but there is nothing sustainable about not having any cap. It is not as though the Minister is replacing the current cap with another level of cap. This will just be an absolute free for all. My other amendment in the grouping, amendment No. 12, is to address a provision that essentially gives an open invitation to airlines to bully the Government and talk down Ireland if they perceive there to be some inhibitor of their commercial interests in Dublin. It gives licence to a Minister for Transport to change planning conditions where they are perceived to be potentially damaging to " the international reputation of the State in respect of air transport". It is extremely open-ended, entirely unfalsifiable and there is no objective standard for reputational damage. There is no evidence threshold or definition. The provision could be invoked on the basis of adverse commentary by Michael O'Leary, for example. We are essentially enshrining corporate bullying of the State in this law. That is why I want to delete that line. It gives carte blanche to airlines to talk down the country and say they are not happy that it is sufficiently internationally connected, so they will pull all their flights and that Ireland has a terrible reputation for international connectivity or whatever the buzzword is. It will essentially allow airlines to bully the State and Ministers to use that bullying as an excuse to raise the cap again and again, without heed to any of our climate obligations, either our domestic climate targets or international ones. These emissions do count. Even though we do not count international aviation emissions, they do go somewhere and these actions have consequences whether the Government likes it or not. --- 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/2026-06-30/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-09-14T01:01:06+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-06-30