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Email:
norunway@gmail.com
15
January 2006 Our Case UPROAR (United Portmarnock Residents Opposing Another Runway) is a sub-committee of the Portmarnock Community Association opposed to the building of a new parallel east-west runway as proposed by the Dublin Airport Authority (DAA). This new runway, which is projected to lead to a growth in air-traffic to 38 million passengers by 2025, would be an unsustainable development. It would cause more health, educational and environmental damage to communities surrounding Dublin Airport, including the 10,000 Portmarnock people represented by UPROAR who already suffer under current air-traffic. We are opposed to it because of what it would do to the lives of our people, but we also believe that, if additional runway capacity really is needed, Dublin Airport is a very poor location for it. It would be a bad investment from a national economic and social point of view. For any project exceeding €30 million, the Department of Finance guidelines for the appraisal of capital expenditure proposals by public bodies such as the DAA, require that a cost-benefit analysis be carried out on a range of alternatives to determine which option yields the highest net benefit to society as a whole, all pros and cons considered. The costs to businesses, commuters and residents of all negative consequences for them must be estimated, together with all benefits. Only the most positively net beneficial option should be chosen. To our knowledge, no such study has been carried out. Minister for Transport Martin Cullen has refused to demand such a study, in spite of the Finance guidelines. The economic case against a Fingal location is made by UPROAR in its own "Cost Benefit Analysis of New Runway" at www.norunway.com/cba. Our rough but conservative and probably robust estimate of costs and benefits shows a massive net loss of about €3 billion for a Dublin Airport location versus a very positive gain for a well-located, state-of-the-art new airport serving both Dublin and the regions to the west and southwest of Dublin. Unlike the DAA's unsustainable proposal, such an alternative location would conform to National Spatial Strategy and would provide an opportunity for real competition between airports. Bórd na Móna has offered vast areas of former bog for airport development. Among the main contributing factors to the €3 billion loss are hugely increased road traffic congestion in Fingal and a gross misuse of thousands of acres of very valuable public and private land whose real value for residential and commercial purposes is being ignored. That huge investment can never be recouped from extra runway earnings, even before considering the consequences of putting a new flight-path over Portmarnock, a long established community which has the highest percentage of family homes in the country. This runway would put our community into an Airport Crash Zone. It is patently absurd that, for safety reasons, new schools cannot be built under an existing flight-path, but a dangerous new flight-path can be put directly over our children's existing schools. We do not
say our estimates are definitive but we believe they make an overwhelming
a priori case for a proper independent cost-benefit analysis, as required
by the Department of Finance guidelines. The Dáil was misled
on 22 June 2005 when Minister Cullen said the DAA had followed the guidelines
in this case: there is no cost-benefit study as required by the guidelines.
Why does this government resist the transparency of a cost-benefit analysis
of a proposed runway, which if built, would freeze national aviation
infrastructure policy for a generation?
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