Ciarán Ahern: Government's Aviation Bill Ignores Climate

Comhairleach, this is an aggressively anti-climate bill. This government is making it clear to us that climate, environment or biodiversity considerations have absolutely no place when it comes to our aviation policy. And it is ironic, Comhairleach, that we're debating this proposal today to add potentially limitless additional carbon into our atmosphere on the same day we're suffering with record temperatures here, hot weather warnings are in place across Europe, we've heard that 40 people have drowned in France over the last few days due to the heat, children are dying in cars, Europe is heating at twice the rate of the rest of the world and this is where our government's priorities lie. This is the third bill produced this term that seeks to disapply the Climate Act. We've seen it with the Infrastructure Bill, we're seeing it with this bill and we'll see it later again this week with the LNG Reserve Bill. Section 39 of this bill says Section 15 of the Climate Act won't apply having regard to the likely consequences for the economy of the state and for international connectivity if an order is not made. This effectively amounts to a legislative predetermination that economic interests and connectivity, whatever the hell that means, Minister, completely override climate considerations. Even our birds and natural habitats regulations are in the crossfire now. I know that the Minister will point to Section 15 of this bill and assure us all that environmental impact assessments will be carried out and so on. But those provisions are rendered essentially meaningless by Section 25 of this bill which states that, in effect, the Minister can just ignore or override an environmental condition from on-commission Penala following an EIA. So basically the whole environmental assessment process in this bill is advisory at best. Moreover, in cases where the Commission determines that there's likely to be adverse effects on habitats from a proposal to increase the cap, the Minister can unilaterally decide that there is, quote, imperative reasons of overriding public interest in the proposal going ahead. There's no requirement on the Minister for any sort of consultation in coming to that decision. He might opt to consult with the Housing Minister on Commission Penala, the DAA and other Ministers, but only where the Minister is already of the opinion that the public interest provision already exists. There's no obligation to consult with any dedicated climate and environmental bodies such as the Climate Change Advisory Council, the EPA or indeed the Climate Minister at any stage in this process. And for the record, not once is the Climate and Environment Minister mentioned in this bill. The Housing Minister appears repeatedly. Given that Section 39 explicitly disapplies Section 15 of the Climate Act for both the Minister and on Commission Penala, the absence of any climate ministerial consultation is beyond concerning. It's becoming increasingly clear that there's been a significant amount of corporate capture of this government, whether it's this bill, which could have been written by Michael O'Leary himself, or with the data centre drive, or with the LNG bill, which is being brought through to ensure continuity of their ever-increasing gas demands. We'll keep hearing an economic argument from the government on removing the passenger cap, and I will come back to that, but we need to be honest about what this bill will do. Scrapping the passenger cap at Dublin Airport means more flights, more pollution and higher emissions at a time when Ireland is already dangerously off track on climate action. Any hypothetical economic gains from removing the cap, and I think they're debatable, could be wiped out by the potential £26 billion in fines we might be facing from failing to meet our climate targets. And this bill doesn't just raise the current cap of 32 million passengers, which, for the record, Dublin Airport has consistently broken in recent years. It doesn't just raise it to some higher figure, it allows the Minister to scrap the cap altogether. There's no alternative ceiling proposed. The Minister, yourself, you've floated a figure of 60 million passengers a year, almost doubling the current limit. And as per anything you might expect on climate from this government, there's a clause exempting the Minister from having regard to section 15 of the Climate Act when making this decision. So, if this expansion is as sustainable as the Minister says, then why is this government running scared of the Climate Action Act and of environmental legislation? The Minister and this government are intent on compounding our already abysmal record on climate and are abandoning any pretense of caring anymore, of wanting to at least try and catch up on what we have legally committed to. Against the backdrop of our failure in achieving our climate and emissions reductions targets, the government is now proposing a policy change that independent analysis suggests would see flight emissions increase by 24% if passenger numbers rose to 40 million. That's an almost 581,000 tonnes of additional CO2 by 2034. And 40 million passengers is a conservative scenario. As I've said, the Minister suggested 60 million passengers in time. But it's fine, according to government, because international aviation emissions aren't counted towards our national emission figures. But our emissions do, obviously, impact globally, and in a world where only 5% of our global population has ever taken a flight, to suggest that because we don't count international aviation emissions means it's okay to expand exponentially betrays a total disregard for any semblance of global climate justice. This government is rapidly losing any credibility internationally and here at home when it comes to the climate crisis. That has consequences. You can't, on the one hand, tell our workers, farmers, hauliers, households that they must bear the cost of our decarbonisation efforts, and on the other hand, wave through unlimited aviation growth with a legislative shield against your own Climate Act. People will understandably start to question why they should bother when those at the top are not only allowed to continue to pollute at a massive scale, but they're actually being facilitated in increasing their emissions. This is a bowing down to corporate interests and greed, dressed up in the language of connectivity and competitiveness. And this isn't just a moral failing, it is a legal one too. Notwithstanding the disapplication of our own climate laws, under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, the state has a positive obligation to protect its citizens from the foreseeable harms of the climate crisis. I don't mean that in an abstract sense. The European Court of Human Rights found exactly this in the recent Clemescenien case against Switzerland. The Dutch Supreme Court found likewise in the Urgenda case. And the International Court of Justice in its advisory opinion last year confirmed that states must use all means at their disposal to prevent harm from greenhouse gas emissions, including expressly emissions from fossil fuel consumption, which of course includes aviation fuel. A legal analysis of the passenger cap removal commissioned by Opportunity Green and prepared by Barrister Tim Johnson of Brick Court Chambers sets out plainly that Ireland, already behind on our own targets, already behind comparable countries and already in breach of previous climate commitments, is exposed to a credible claim that lifting this cap while simultaneously accepting the decision from climate scrutiny constitutes a breach of Article 8 of the ECHR. I'm sure that a copy of that report has been shared with the Minister. So we're not only risking our climate, the government is also actively risking public funds in litigation that this analysis tells us is entirely foreseeable. The Minister has relied on the environmental impact assessment provisions as a way of getting around the climate argument. He knows well that this is a wholly inadequate framework for assessing the climate impact of this decision. Because Section 15 of the 2015 Act will not apply, any environmental impact assessment carried out under this Bill cannot properly account for the national transition objective or our greenhouse gas mitigation obligations. In any case, are we really to believe that an environmental impact assessment is going to throw up something that will make the Minister reverse course on this? It's literally written into the Bill that he can simply ignore them. It's a fait accompli. But we have clear jurisprudence from several different courts, including the ECHR and the UK Supreme Court, that environmental impact assessments for high-emitting projects must comprehensively assess downstream combustion emissions, must look at scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions and must be grounded in the best available science. The cases in the rulings of these courts involve fossil fuel extraction, but the logic applies equally to a project that will materially increase aviation emissions into the future. If this government proceeds with an assessment framework that does not capture the full climate footprint of additional flights, arrivals and departures, CO2 and non-CO2 effects alike, it is inviting a legal challenge that, on the weight of recent European jurisprudence, it stands a real chance of losing. Exempting the Minister from section 15 of the Climate Act doesn't make the climate consequences disappear. It defers them. It leaves even less room to manoeuvre for every future Minister, planning authority and local councillor who will all have to find emissions reductions elsewhere to compensate for the growth this Bill will unleash. We're still waiting to hear from the Minister on where the equivalent emissions reductions are going to come from. So will it be farmers who are asked to pick up the slack? Others in the transport sector? Regular households, many of whom are already doing their best to be environmentally conscious? And it's households in the Minister's own constituency who will feel the impact of this move most immediately by virtue of the fact that they live under the flight paths. The consequences here are being pushed further downstream to the local planning authority, which can fiddle with planning conditions but can't touch one lever that actually matters – the number of aircraft flying overhead. We've seen where this can lead us. There was a ruling in the Hague District Court in 2024 which stated that the Dutch Government had acted unlawfully in failing to protect residents near Schiphol Airport from noise pollution, breaching Article 8 of the ECHR and ordered the Government to provide practical and effective protections to those affected. The same protections under Article 8 apply to residents here, and further protections apply under Article 40.3 of our own Constitution, which obliges the State to protect the property rights of every citizen. The assessment provisions in this Bill are unlikely to meet even the basic common law obligations to consult those whose rights are affected. I referred earlier to the Minister making decisions on this cap based on economic interests and international connectivity. Can the Minister please define international connectivity? Because there's no definition in this Bill. Does it mean routes to specific destinations, frequency of services, the number of carriers, some other aggregate measures? We know we live on an island. We know we don't want to be stranded here. But how much connectivity is enough? This approach to connectivity is just like your approach to the unmitigated expansion of data centres. How much is enough? If the Minister is basing his decision on international connectivity, it would be helpful to know what the actual metric is. On the economic case, I would point the Minister to a study commissioned by the Social Council for Shipol Airport. It examined what would happen to broad welfare under three different scenarios for the size of the airport in terms of flight numbers. Broad welfare, for the benefit of this House, is a framework that goes beyond GDP to capture economic output. It looks at employment, health, housing, noise, nature and climate all together. Precisely the kind of holistic accounting that this Government has failed to apply to its own decision on Dublin Airport. The findings are instructive, and I would seriously encourage the Minister to examine the report. The study found that even a substantially smaller Shipol, 250,000 flights, barely half of today's traffic, could still preserve a large majority of the connectivity that Dutch travellers actually use because the destinations that disappear are disproportionately sustained by transfer passengers rather than Dutch residents. The extra journey time imposed on the average traveller was measured in minutes, not hours. The most salient finding of this report, though, is that the aviation sector losses are dwarfed by the climate gains. In other words, restraint on flight numbers doesn't just reduce harm. On the Dutch evidence, it produces a net welfare gain once climate costs are properly priced in, even after you account for aviation sector losses. This study also acknowledges that capacity caps aren't the only option. It refers to a cost-benefit analysis of the options available to Shipol, tellingly titled, Shrink or Become Sustainable. The analysis found that environmental and noise measures, including a higher distance-based flight tax, deliver considerably greater broad welfare benefits than a blunt capacity restriction does, precisely because pricing instruments let you target the noisiest, most polluting, longest-haul flights rather than cutting capacity indiscriminately. So the lesson is not that caps are the only available tool. It's that doing nothing and simply lifting the cap with no replacement mechanism, as you're doing here, is the worst of all options. Reducing flights or pricing their environmental cost property can deliver a net gain for society. Unlimited expansion on this evidence risks a net loss. And what's more, we have a persistent travel deficit in this country. Irish people spend more abroad than tourists spend here. So more flights actually takes more money out of the country than it brings in. Research shows this, and it undermines the government's claim that aviation expansion is an unqualified economic benefit. This serious international evidence shows that the relationship between airport size and national prosperity is far weaker than that assumption, and that the environmental and health costs of unrestrained growth are not some marginal externality to be waved away. They are large enough on a comparable European analysis to turn an apparently pro-growth decision into a net loss for the country as a whole. And a final point I'd like to make, and I think this is frankly pathetic, is that this Bill provides an open invitation for airlines to bully the government and talk down Ireland if they perceive that there's some inhibitor to their commercial interests in Dublin. Section 25 gives licence to the Minister to change planning conditions where they are perceived to be potentially damaging to, quote, the international reputation of the state in respect of air transport. This is extremely open-ended and essentially unfalsifiable. There's no objective standard for reputational damage, no evidence threshold, no definition. The provision could be invoked on the basis of adverse commentary from Michael O'Leary, a familiar noise to all of us. What do we think is going to happen here? We're going to have an airline lobby that's never happy, and we'll have incessant calls to expand and expand and expand, knowing that if they paint Ireland in an unsavoury light, they'll get their way. We're enshrining corporate bullying of the state in our law. That is embarrassing, and it's the cherry on top of what is fundamentally a regressive and bad policy.