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.

Sentiment score: -0.02

I thank the Minister for his comments and for listening so attentively to what people were saying. On my amendment, the issue I have is how much connectivity is ever going to be enough. We still do not have an answer on that. He mentioned a figure of 40 million passengers being the first application.

Sentiment score: 0.09

The Minister's assumption is that will be the first application. There is no guarantee anywhere here, however, that it is going to be a 40 million cap. There is presumably nothing preventing the DAA from applying for a higher figure. However, that is the Minister's understanding and that is fair enough. Our issue is that there are no limits anywhere in this Bill. There are no parameters for the number of passengers who will be coming through the airport. No real economic assessment has been done here. The Minister stated that there are 1,000 jobs attached to every 1 million passengers, and I ask where he got that figure from and whether it is a figure given to him by the airline industry. At least when it came to the expansion of data centres in this country and the Government's policy on that, it commissioned a report we could scrutinise. The Government acknowledged the need to back up the claims about jobs related to data centres with some hard data. Now, the data is questionable but at least it was put out there by the Government. We have not seen any of that for the claims being made about jobs and the international connectivity of Dublin Airport. Do not get me wrong, we value Dublin Airport. We completely understand that it is a strategic national asset. Part of our concern here relates to balanced regional development. It relates back to what Deputy Crowe was speaking about where flights from Shannon are being run from Dublin rather than Shannon. Will this policy now give rise to Dublin swallowing up everything else? Is international connectivity just a byword for a policy from large international airlines that want to use Dublin Airport as a hub and create an even bigger hub out of Dublin that will not necessarily serve Irish people or passengers but is going to serve these international airlines and passengers who are connecting here to move abroad? I have serious questions about that as well. As a lawyer, I like definitions. Again, as Deputy Whitmore alluded to, we need some metrics to hold the Minister to account. There are emissions connected to every new additional flight that is going to come from Dublin Airport, and we want to have some accountability here. Huge power is being put in the Minister's hands in this Bill, and we want to put some guardrails and parameters around that. Unfortunately, he is determined to dismantle some of the climate guardrails the previous Government put in place through the disapplication of section 15 of the climate Act. The Minister also mentioned that he is not setting aside climate considerations. There are other amendments that relate to this and some of his powers under the Bill. Those powers are contained in section 25 of the Bill, and they are his powers to make an order. I bring this up because the Minister raised it and said he has to consider any conditions that An Coimisiún Pleanála sends to him. That is all true. A process is set out here whereby An Coimisiún Pleanála does an environmental impact assessment, and it can make recommendations and put conditions down that they send to him as a Minister. Under section 25(3), he can decide to include that condition in an order he makes. He can unilaterally decide to vary that condition or he can refuse to include that condition in an order that he makes. That is a massive power for him to simply take as advisory anything that An Coimisiún Pleanála says. I do not accept that he is not setting aside climate considerations here. It is up to him or a future Minister for Transport to say sod whatever An Coimisiún Pleanála said and sod the climate because they will have an explicit power to ignore all of that, and to decide that is what they are going to do. That is a massive flaw in this Bill. If it is the Minister's position that he wants to take climate considerations seriously into account when it comes to our aviation policy, this section 25(3)(c) is a massive problem. We do not have any answers from the Minister on where the savings will come from to counteract the additional emissions coming from Dublin Airport when this airport cap is lifted. We are lifting the Dublin Airport cap, and we still have no other cap. We still have no climate action plan, and we desperately want to see that from the Minister as soon as possible. Emissions from air travel are massive. I do not know if we all consider just how polluting our flights are. To put this in context, the Minister and certainly the electoral nerds among us will have seen last week that the Electoral Commission produced a report about the Irish obsession with posters during election campaigns. It estimated that the carbon emissions for all the posters used in the general election in 2024 had the equivalent of just two return transatlantic flights. That report interestingly said that Irish people hate posters and want to do away with them. If we did do away with election posters, it would simply have the same environmental impact as two full transatlantic flights. We are seriously increasing our carbon emissions here. There is a world in which I can support something like this, but we would need to see where the limits and the guardrails are, and where in the transport sector or elsewhere those savings will come from so we can comply with our legally binding carbon budgets and our international obligations.

Sentiment score: -0.01

I want to press my amendment.

Sentiment score: 0.08