On the face of it, this proposal has a lot of merit. The main point is that land at Dublin Port is too valuable to continue to be used for port activities. According to McDowell, the 600 acres involved, should be put to better use for residential and other commercial activities. At the same time, land of much lower value is available for port development at Bremore. Of course, some land rezoning at both sites would be required but that should not be an impediment if redevelopment made economic and social sense. A similar case has recently been made for Limerick docklands. These proposals should obviously be subjected to objective evaluation to measure all the pros and cons.

There is of course an economic rationale for what is happening here: a huge increase in site values is driving development in a more market-determined way, as one would expect in a market-driven Celtic-Tiger economy. It is happening widely, to hotels and pubs, for example. The issue will arise wherever current and expected earnings do not come up to the earning potential of the site at its best alternative
use. This is the concept of "opportunity cost" of assets.

But, why is what's good for seaports not good for airports? Why, in particular, does the same logic not apply to Dublin Airport? Do Minister McDowell and the Progressive Democrats only do seaports?

The value of some 840 acres of public land at Dublin Airport that will be used up by the proposed new runway has been ignored in the consideration of the merits of that proposal. It is worth some €2 million an acre. There are also some 3,500 acres of land under the new flight-path that will be devalued by about €500,000 an acre because its development is restricted.

The Portmarnock Community Association has demanded that alternative locations be considered for any needed expansion of Dublin Airport, such as more development at Cork and Shannon or the building of a new modern airport on a green-field site to serve the Greater Dublin Area. The public land at Dublin Airport, not needed for a runway, could be put to much better use. At the same time there are, for example, thousands of hectares of publicly-owned cutaway bogland of little value available for airport and airport-induced development within easy commuting distance
of Dublin.

Those demands have been ignored and no proper cost-benefit analysis has been done of the current runway proposal and alternatives, as required by the Department of Finance, and as reinforced in his "value for money" speech to the Dublin Chamber of Commerce by Brian Cowen last October.

If such a study were done, these relative land costs would be considered in the balance, along with other costs that are also being ignored, such as the costs of road congestion resulting from an eventual trebling to 55 million passengers per year, and the costs of pollution, danger, noise and flooding to be imposed on the 100,000 people of Portmarnock, Malahide and Swords. UPROAR has estimated that the current runway proposal will waste at least €3 billion while a new airport would give a very attractive rate of return on investment (7.4% per annum).

Of course, if an alternative were chosen to the reckless, unsustainable and uneconomic expansion of Dublin Airport, some land rezoning would also be required there, as at Dublin Port in the case of the PDs' proposal. However, if the economic and social case were as strong as it seems, it is hard to believe our enlightened councillors and planning authorities would stand in the way of such progress.