When TDs were debating new planning laws a couple of years ago, DAA asked for special concessions to make direct applications to An Coimisiún Pleanála instead of Fingal County Council. This request to the minister for housing was limited to files with no aircraft noise implications. The answer was a resounding `no’. DAA remains subject to Fingal planners.
Back then, the housing minister was none other than Darragh O’Brien, now Minister for Transport and shareholder for the State in DAA, the operator of Dublin and Cork airports. O’Brien has long since changed his mind. Three days ago he received Cabinet agreement to prepare new laws to scrap the 32 million Dublin Airport passenger cap. He also wants to move DAA planning away from Fingal altogether.
“I don’t believe, even for all the good work that Fingal County Council have done, that a piece of national infrastructure as critical as Dublin Airport should sit within the planning authority of the local authority,” the Minister told reporters.
The move followed the belated settling last week of a spectacular bust-up between the DAA board and former chief executive Kenny Jacobs. The dispute meant DAA was never far from negative headlines for many months, and a constant irritant for O’Brien, who baulked at a September €960,000 exit package (agreed via a mediation process) for Jacobs.
RM Block
The affair was resolved only minutes before Jacobs’ case against the company was to be heard in the High Court last week. Jacobs voluntarily stood down and received a payment which, according to O’Brien, was “considerably less” than the September proposal. He will also receive legal fees from DAA, a very large sum given that total legal costs in the affair are well in excess of €1 million, with some assessments suggesting such costs could well be approaching €2 million.
The settlement cleared the way for the Minister to finally confront knotty issues that have been bearing down on DAA for years. In many ways, however, this is akin to navigating spaghetti junction.
Appointments
Key DAA appointments loom, with imminent board moves raising questions about compliance with corporate governance rules.
Not only is a permanent successor to Jacobs required. The term of DAA board chairman Basil Geoghegan ends in June, one of four non-executive board seats that fall vacant in coming months. This is on top of three existing non-executive board vacancies, a situation that has left four DAA worker-directors close to a board majority. The board is supposed to work under a majority of independent non-executive directors appointed by the Minister.
Bringing DAA planning under An Coimisiún Pleanála is part of a complex series of measures, the first of which is eliminating the 32 million cap. “We can’t have a situation whereby there is a false inhibitor to growth in place any more,” O’Brien said.
The cap was imposed almost 20 years ago as part of planning approval for the second terminal in the airport. It was breached first in 2019, prompting a Fingal enforcement order. However, urgency over the issue faded when air travel collapsed in the shadow of pandemic lockdowns.
Covid-19 is now a distant memory. But no progress was made in those hard times to tackle the prospect of the cap being breached again whenever air travel recovered after the pandemic. That is exactly what happened. With passenger numbers surging again in the booming economy, the cap was surpassed in each of the past two years and is likely again to be surpassed in 2026.
This has left the semi-State company in violation of planning consents and facing another Fingal enforcement action, airport slot restrictions, a backlash from US airlines, flak from local carriers Ryanair and Aer Lingus, and expensive litigation in Irish and European courts.
Ryanair, Aer Lingus and US lobby group Airlines for America (A4A) took a legal challenge in Dublin against the cap in 2024. This led the High Court to send questions relating to European regulations on airport slots to the Court of Justice of the EU in Luxembourg. Enforcement of the cap was suspended for two years pending this case but matters are advancing steadily.
In an advisory opinion on Thursday, the European court’s advocate general said the cap was legally sound. Such opinions are not binding on judges but they are influential and are often followed in formal rulings of the court. The upshot for O’Brien is that the advocate’s opinion has intensified pressure to prepare, publish and enact legislation to eliminate the cap.
New infrastructure
Such matters are all the more heated because they come as Fingal planners and separate aircraft noise regulators within the council progress a major DAA infrastructure application to airport developments that will bring its annual passenger capacity to 40 million.
The application for this €2 billion project, submitted in December 2023, is proceeding “in parallel” to the switchover to the new arrangements giving DAA planning powers to An Coimisiún Pleanála. There is also the strong likelihood that any appeal to Fingal’s eventual decision will end up with the appeals board in any event.
The DAA submission to Fingal includes voluminous documents, comprising more than 7,000 pages and almost 700 drawings. The planning determination was always going to be a time-consuming process, but it has been hobbled by delay.
For one thing, it took almost two years to complete a noise assessment for regulators in the Aircraft Noise Competent Authority (Anca), a Fingal division that was set up specifically to examine such matters. Anca sought the information from DAA in March 2024 but it wasn’t delivered until November 2025. Asked about the delay, DAA said Anca granted an extension pending a separate planning ruling on night flights using the airport’s second runway.
For another, the DAA initiated a separate “no-build” application to Fingal in December 2024 to lift the passenger cap to 36 million without new infrastructure. In November, the DAA board dropped this fast-track proposal, as it was known, but not before trouble with the local authority.
Fingal was quick to deem the no-build plan invalid, prompting an angry DAA response. In turn, this led Fingal to file a Department of Transport complaint in which it accused DAA of “shocking” conduct in its noisy publicity campaign against the cap.
All of this points to tension bubbling under the surface during the long wrangle between the DAA board and Jacobs.
The chief executive was suspended days before Christmas and opened a High Court case on January 8th seeking reinstatement and a halt to a disciplinary investigation into 20 allegations against him. Even as that conflict came to a head, disruption over the cap festered.
“I was contacted by telephone by Mr Keith Glatz of the Airlines for America trade body on 7th and 8th January 2026 asking about the passenger cap at Dublin Airport and why I had been non-responsive to messages,” Jacobs said in an affidavit sworn on January 8th and opened in court.
“I have been non-responsive because I have been shut out of the DAA email system since the morning of my suspension. Mr Glatz informed me that his organisation has filed formal complaint with the US department of transport, of which DAA must be aware,” he added.
“This is a matter of incredible significance for DAA, the Irish State, Irish aviation in general and specifically our connectivity with the US, as reciprocal action could be taken by the US government, restricting slots for Aer Lingus at US airports.”
DAA adopted a business-as-usual stance during the boardroom battle – and it was business-as-usual too for air carriers and other customers, clients and counterparties of the business. The A4A complaint to the US transport department, filed in Glatz’s name, was made the very day Jacobs went to the High Court.
The US trade body claimed the cap violates EU regulations and US transport agreements, describing it as “an unjustifiable and unreasonable discriminatory and anti-competitive practice”. The complaint also called for immediate action from Washington to enforce US interests.
In ordinary times, such demands might be seen as a show of industrial force to warn of dire consequences if the cap survived European litigation and enforcement threatened Dublin slots used by US carriers.
But international relations are anything but normal in Donald Trump’s second administration. The emboldened US president tends to hit out at friend as well as foe.
With Micheál Martin due in the White House next month for St Patrick’s Day talks with Trump, it cannot be good for the Taoiseach that US airlines are restive over the passenger cap and demanding action from Washington. Needless to say, any US retaliation against cap enforcement in Dublin would be something of a nightmare.
This – and the resolution of the Jacobs affair – was the immediate backdrop to O’Brien’s request for Cabinet approval to prepare detailed draft law to do away with the cap. Four months had already passed since the Cabinet gave an initial go-ahead for the move – and 14 months since such steps were incorporated in the programme for government.
Resistance
O’Brien has publicly acknowledged civil service resistance. In some accounts, this centres on technical legal issues arising from an intervention of this nature in the planning system. After all, DAA’s application to Fingal is still live.
Further civil service concern surrounds the lack of public transport connectivity at Dublin Airport, with the long-delayed MetroLink project in its procurement phase only and many years away from starting services.
Still, the Minister faces overriding concerns. “There’s three principles that are enshrined within the legislation,” he said before the Cabinet met on Tuesday.
“One is the power to amend an existing cap, the power to revoke but also, very importantly looking into the future, the power to preclude any imposition of a cap into the future based on any future application.”
When will the law be enacted? O’Brien has said this will be done “certainly by the end of the year” and possibly before then “which would be my plan”. His department was no more specific than that, saying he hopes for enactment “as soon as possible this year”.
Such remarks drew a dismissive response from Ryanair chief executive Michael O’Leary, who said the Taoiseach should ensure the cap is removed before he goes to Washington. “Micheál Martin has a 20-seat majority, he has wasted 14 months doing nothing,” O’Leary said.
Predictably enough, Aer Lingus was less forceful in its language. But it still pressed for rapid progress.
“Aer Lingus has consistently called for Government intervention in the form of a legislative solution that addresses and resolves the passenger cap issue, and therefore welcomes … action this week in bringing the memo to Cabinet seeking approval for legislation to remove the cap,” it said.
“However, as this is simply an initial step in the process, Aer Lingus would like to see urgent progression, enactment and commencement of the legislation to provide the certainty that is required for the Irish economy.”
A4A welcomed the Cabinet decision but it too wants speedy delivery. “Dublin Airport is a vital gateway for transatlantic travel and trade, and the continued application of the passenger cap is in violation of the basic requirements of the US-EU open skies agreement. Each day the cap remains in place compounds legal, commercial and operational uncertainty for airlines,” the group said.
“We urge swift adoption of this legislation to ensure US-Ireland aviation connectivity can continue to support economic growth, tourism and competition on both sides of the Atlantic.”
Uncertainties
Still, many uncertainties remain. One surrounds the future of Anca, the noise regulator which has been part of Fingal County Council since 2019. Under the law establishing this office, An Coimisiún Pleanála’s predecessor, An Bord Pleanála, was designated as the appeals body under EU aircraft noise regulations.
If DAA strategic infrastructure applications will in future be made directly to An Coimisiún Pleanála, who will handle the noise element and any appeals?
Asked whether Anca will remain part of Fingal County Council in the new regime, O’Brien’s department said: “The broader issue of the most appropriate planning framework for Dublin Airport, including the noise regulatory regime, will be examined once the more immediate matter of the passenger cap is addressed.”
Fingal itself had little to say on Anca’s future and other aspects of O’Brien’s plan. “Whatever the rules are we will implement them,” the local authority said.
There is also the rather salient question of O’Brien’s other responsibilities as Minister for Climate, Energy and the Environment.
Climate activists believe elimination of the cap and the ruling out of any future cap will only encourage more air travel, leading to yet more harm to the environment. With Ireland badly off track in the drive to meet binding emissions targets, O’Brien was accused of ignoring his climate responsibilities by removing the cap.
Asked whether that was so, the Department of Transport said: “Under the proposed legislation, in advance of the Minister making an order, An Coimisiún Pleanála, will screen for, and if necessary, undertake full assessments under the environmental impact assessment directive, habitats directive and water framework directive.”
Movement this week follows long delay. But this remains a work in progress and there many risks on the horizon.
