It might sound like some secret facility that Dublin Airport doesn’t want you to know about, but Area 14 has a more benign function.
The low-lit, double-height basement in Terminal 1 serves as an overflow check-in area. It sits underneath the existing Ryanair check-in area. Dublin Airport Authority (DAA) says it is typically used “during the busy summer months”.
The basement, built as part of the original terminal building back in the late 1960s/early 1970s, is sizeable, equivalent to about a quarter of the floor area of the terminal’s ground floor.
It was designed with something specific in mind, something that never materialised. The double-height ceiling is a clue. It was meant to accommodate a rail or metro link.
The forward-thinking architects had baked the idea of such a link-up into the original design, digging deeper into foundations to facilitate the additional height requirement for a station, on the presumption that a busy modern airport would need to be integrated with a local transport system.
This was long before the stop-start Metro North/MetroLink project came along, which is already 20 years in the planning without a track being laid.
For some reason (nobody in DAA could tell me) the plan never went further and the double-height ceiling is all that remains, a ghost link that never was. The road to our planning limbo is seemingly paved with good intentions.
The proposed MetroLink project has in any case earmarked a different docking station for its airport stop, located in Terminal 2′s surface car park.
“From here, commuters will have a short walk to Terminal 1 and Terminal 2,” Metrolink says.
“The station will be integrated with the future ground transportation centre, a major transportation hub included in the master plan for Dublin Airport,” it says, while noting passengers’ journey time to Dublin Airport will be less than 20 minutes from the city centre.
The proposed MetroLink project will run from north of Swords under Dublin Airport and on into Dublin city, where it will run largely underground before terminating at Charlemont Bridge. The 18.8-km line with 16 stations, 11 of them underground, currently has a €9.5 billion price tag.
To be fair to Dublin Airport, it has been better than the State at planning for a bigger numbers. The land for the second runway, which opened in 2022, was acquired and set aside as far back as the late 1960s. It also pushed ahead with Terminal 2 in the face of objections and critics who took issue with the airport’s passenger projections. Ironically one of the chief objectors was the airport’s biggest customer, Ryanair.
The airline’s boss Michael O’Leary rubbished the idea from the start and arrived at the opening in 2010 in a hearse, dressed as an undertaker to lay a wreath saying it would mark “the death of Irish tourism”.
Asked what he thought of the new terminal, O’Leary said: “It’s lovely. And so is the Taj Mahal but I’ll never use it. It’s a statement of modern Ireland. A big, bankrupt property development. It’s a nice place to welcome IMF executives.”
If Dublin Airport is running up against capacity constraints with two terminals, imagine the congestion we would be facing with just one.
Terminal 1′s underutilised basement is not the only ghost station in the State. Dublin’s Mater Hospital spent an estimated €12 million on a “station box” (in construction parlance, a box-like underground structure for a transportation system) in anticipation of the original Metro North project. But the updated MetroLink plan runs along a different route, making the Mater’s station box redundant.
Planning for a bigger population is something most states, but Ireland particularly, seem to fall down on. Whether it’s a product of short political cycles or in Ireland’s case a poor planning system, which arguably affords objectors too much power, successive governments here have been poor at delivering infrastructure.
Another critical factor relates to the management of the public purse, a hot topic in the context of the recent €14 billion Apple windfall and the election promises we’ve had over the past three weeks. Failure to keep a lid on spending has repeatedly forced Irish governments into periods of austerity.
And the first thing that gets slashed when the country is on the back foot financially is the capital budget. It’s politically easier for ministers to cancel capital projects than to announce tax hikes hence we’ve had a stop-start approach to our infrastructural build, which is blowing back on us now.
The MetroLink project is emblematic. The original plan was the centrepiece of the Fianna Fáil-led government’s Transport 21 plan, launched in 2005, with phase one earmarked for delivery in 2010. It was suspended in 2011 (with €200 million already spent) when the economy hit the skids.
The current MetroLink project won’t be operational until 2035, 65 years after the initial Terminal 1 architects envisaged such a link-up.
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