Airports gone wild

One of Bertie Ahern’s home stretch events today was to launch the Dublin Airport Authority’s plan for Dublin Airport City.   Not to put too fine a point on it, this seems like one of the crazier proposals to have emerged over the last year, and symptomatic of much of what is wrong with governance and regional planning in Ireland.  One wonders where the Greens and rural Fianna Fail TDs are when something like is going on. 

Needless to say, Bertie loves the idea –

The DAA masterplan reflects a level of ambition and vision that is entirely appropriate to the standing that Ireland now enjoys as one of the success stories of this globalised era.

Located in the vicinity of Europe’s eighth largest international airport, and served directly by the new metro and our growing motorway network, this exciting new business zone can grow into a dynamic new economic hub for the Greater Dublin area.

It also has real potential to contribute to a strengthening of the all-island economy through its strategic location on the Dublin-Belfast economic corridor.

Dublin Airport City is expected to include 600,000 square metres of high quality, next generation office space, accompanied by a further 40,000 square metres of retail, hotel and conference facilities.  Phased development over a 15-20 year period will deliver a range of business services to rival any business campus, anywhere in the world.

Bertie pitched the plan as being consistent with the National Spatial Strategy and the National Development Plan, and it also claimed to be included with Fingal County Council’s development plan.   But consider some of the potential problems with this proposal:

• It makes the Dublin Airport Authority, already an operator of a shopping mall with an airport attached (a la Heathrow), into a local property developer and operator of a business park.  How can this be consistent with its supposed specialization in, er, airports?
• They are neither the first or the last to have an idea of an airport city.  It’s being done all over the world.  See especially the Arab states of the Gulf.  Indeed one suspects that the idea for the airport city was developed by expensive consultants who had worked on similar plans for Bahrain and Dubai.
• It concentrates yet more development on the M1 corridor, already the most highly developed part of the country and severely congested.
• The underlying logic is incoherent.  Bertie sold it as another “cluster” like the IFSC, the idea being that businesses can gain from being close together.  But Brian Cowen’s proposal to extend the IFSC to Belfast shows that clusters don’t have to involve physical proximity.
• It induces more development around Dublin Airport.   This risks the same mistake as Heathrow, setting up the noise headaches and lack of terminal and runway space that have made Heathrow such a nightmare.  Indeed, it risks dissipating one of Dublin’s key advantages over Heathrow, the fact that is on the north-south axis of the city and not east-west: planes land into or against the prevailing westerly, which sends planes right over central London on the Heathrow approach, but keeps them away from the most heavily populated areas of Dublin.  But not if there’s a new Dublin Airport City acting as a magnet for people and buildings.
• It creates a conflict of interest for the DAA.  Use land for airport space or property development?  It might prefer the quick capital gains of the latter.
• It makes nonsense of the government’s commitment to spread development to other regions.  As it happens, Bertie left the DAA launch event for Buncrana to visit the site of a new “decentralised” government office and from there to open Niall Blaney’s new office.  So Donegal gets a few bureaucratic and political crumbs while Dublin gets a new city. 

There’s little hope of the political system generating much in the way of careful consideration of whether the Airport City is a good idea.  Maybe Michael O’Leary will lead the opposition.