Independents4Change councillor Dean Mulligan has accused Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary of being “just looking for a sound bite” after the airline boss told north Dublin residents affected by aircraft noise to “suck it up”.
Speaking to Gript in response to O’Leary’s interview on Newstalk yesterday, Mulligan, who represents the Swords area, said local grievances were not with the airport’s existence, but with its alleged disregard for agreed planning procedures.
“My reaction is that he’s just putting out a sound bite that has no basis whatsoever,” Cllr. Mulligan said.
“The community isn’t upset that Dublin Airport is there. The community is upset that they engaged like anyone does in a planning process, which is a legal requirement for any statutory body or individual.”
He argued that if a private individual disobeyed planning permission, they would face enforcement – and said the same should apply to Dublin Airport.
“If me or you are applying for planning permission tomorrow and we disobey it, there’s an enforcement order,” he said.
“So the fact is that Dublin Airport are going against the planning authority’s decisions and they’re doing their own thing – that’s the grievance.”
The councillor said the core issue was that aircraft are not adhering to the flight paths laid out in their planning permission, and claimed that many residents were misled during the consultation process.
“Their issue is the flight paths that they have put in for planning permission, and anyone who wants to build in Fingal has to adhere to the noise contours, which they’re not even flying,” he said.
“They’re not flying the flight paths, which are agreed in their current planning permission or the ones agreed in the 2007 application or the alterations that they’ve done in the last application.”
Mulligan claimed this has resulted in residents being unfairly affected by aircraft noise in ways that had not been forecast during planning.
“The grievance isn’t that Dublin Airport have a new runway,” he said.
“The grievance is that they had a consultation period, community engaged, people were told that X area would be in noise zone A and B and they would be relevant for an insulation scheme because of the noise and everything else, where there’s a significant amount more people disturbed by noise.”
He continued: “What Michael O’Leary thinks or cares about is irrelevant to me. The fact is planes are flying flight paths that they didn’t get permission for and there’s more people materially affected by noise.”
Cllr. Mulligan also described a specific example of how the planning and noise contour discrepancies have impacted residents.
“I know one person who built a house,” he said.
“They got planning permission on the site, they moved 800 metres down the road that wasn’t in noise contour B,” he said.
“They’re more affected by noise now than they would have been 800 metres down the road where they wouldn’t have been on the flight path.”
According to the councillor, the flight paths were altered after planning was granted, without public engagement.
“After the planning permission was agreed, after the runway was built, they had what was called a safety case,” he said.
“A safety case is where the people involved in the runways that are not Dublin Airport, they are not the DAA, so that’s the Irish Aviation Authority and Air Nav, the air traffic controllers, met and said, ‘This is the flight path, we want you to fly.’ They should have had that conversation prior to putting in the planning permission rather than after the fact.”
He added that changes made after the fact have never been mitigated, and that the current 32 million passenger cap is another matter of planning non-compliance.
“The 32 million passenger cap is literally just another planning issue that they haven’t adhered to,” he said.
“We don’t mind them expanding 39 or 40 million, but we want them to do them in a fair way and we want them to actually just engage with the planning process that they have an obligation to do. We want them to be held accountable.”
He added: “I couldn’t care what Michael O’Leary says to be honest with you. I’d love to debate him on it because he’s just looking for a sound bite. It gets an easy win because what he says is easy to say. But what the truth is is quite difficult to explain.”
Mulligan was responding to comments made by O’Leary on The Pat Kenny Show yesterday, where the Ryanair CEO dismissed residents’ concerns about noise from Dublin Airport as “utter nonsense” and said he had “absolutely none” sympathy for them.
“You built a house in the environs of Dublin Airport; Dublin Airport has been there since 1942,” O’Leary said.
“You either moved to the area or built a house in the area. Suck it up.”
He also said residents were more likely to be disturbed by traffic than aircraft noise, stating: “If you’re in your bed and the windows are closed, you won’t even hear it.”
He continued: “There was an election held in November, all the main parties said we’re going to scrap the cap. Seven months later, we’re at the end of July and nothing has happened.”
The DAA’s plans to raise the cap from 32 million passengers annually had encountered resistance from the Green Party during the last coalition Government, while Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have previously expressed support for an increase.
O’Leary has also argued that the current runway infrastructure could support up to 60 million passengers, describing the underuse of that capacity as wasteful.