I welcome the Minister for Defence, Deputy Smith, to the House. I wish to draw attention to a possible alternative use for lands in State ownership in County Meath. I hope to ensure that these lands, which are at present under consideration for sale and disposal, are used to maximum efficiency and economy for the State and the people of the area.
The ground concerned has been in continuous use as an aerodrome since 1917 and is the oldest continuously used aviation site in the country. I am sure the British authorities could not have foreseen the present circumstances when they purchased it in 1917. I have no intention of going into the statistics for the projected development of the greater Dublin area, but it is interesting to note that in the document, A Platform for Change, published by the Dublin Transportation Office in September 2000, there is no reference to air transport. One can only presume that air transport was outside their terms of reference. With the admitted benefit of hindsight, it is somewhat surprising to note that such a significant study on transportation was commissioned without reference to air transport.
I have no doubt that a second airport is required for the greater Dublin area and I think most people would agree with that. The biggest difficulty is deciding upon a location but I hope to demonstrate that Gormanston is an ideal one for a proposed second airport. In proposing a second airport for Dublin I am not advocating a facility to compete with what we in north County Dublin call Collinstown, and what is known nationally as Dublin Airport, but rather to complement the existing facilities there. In anticipating the future needs of that facility as it develops, a properly designed and constructed second – and, almost of necessity, smaller – facility in the greater Dublin area will serve to complement the facilities at Collinstown. Such a second facility could turn out to be an essential element in the balanced development of the Collinstown facility.
I would like to provide some statistics concerning Dublin Airport, which for the remainder of my contribution I will refer to as Collinstown. The projected annual passenger traffic for 2001 is 15 million and that volume is growing at the rate of one million per annum. The airport's current facilities are estimated to have an annual maximum capacity of 20 million. In other words, major infrastructural change and consequent capital expenditure will be required within the next few years to avoid future difficulties that can be foreseen. It is believed that the overall site area at Collinstown has a capacity, subject to infrastructural development, to cater for 40 million passengers per annum. While that may sound a staggering statistic today, at the rate at which airline passenger numbers are increasing it is safe to say that the 40 million level will not be considered outlandish in a relatively short period of time.
Collinstown also represents the largest industrial complex in Ireland. It accounts for a remarkable 2% of our gross domestic product and currently employs 8,000 people on site. In excess of 12,000 more are employed indirectly in the immediate vicinity in jobs which are dependent upon the airport. Those statistics are absolutely staggering and show how huge the Collinstown facility has become.
Although the airport authorities are trying to maximise efficiency, the airport has serious infrastructural difficulties. We are well aware of the difficulties that occurred last summer at peak time which, unfortunately, coincided with a major development of the departures and arrivals halls. That was the most obvious difficulty in the recent past but there were others. A lesser difficulty, but one which is about to become greater, concerns access to and from Dublin Airport, both on the surface by road or rail and equally in the air. There is a major difficulty in the Portmarnock area of north County Dublin arising from what, in effect, is a traffic jam in the air. Such logjams in the flight path over Portmarnock are causing serious environmental difficulties. There is a proposal from Aer Rianta to develop a parallel flight path in precisely the same vicinity. Naturally enough, and with some justification, the residents of that area have major objections to the plan.
Dublin Airport or Collinstown is creaking at the seams and any future development of the infrastructure there will of necessity be extremely expensive. Apart from facilitating the throughput of passengers, to protect the 20,000 people currently employed there, directly and indirectly, it is vital that the facility should operate to maximum efficiency. If it develops a long-term reputation for inefficiency the business will go elsewhere and the economy that has developed around the airport will begin to wither away.
At Gormanston, just across the Meath border, we have the oldest aviation facility in Ireland, which has been in continuous use since 1917 when it was purchased by the British authorities. In 1919 it had a workforce of 651, 65 of whom were pilots. It has a less pleasant place in local and national history as the base for the Black and Tans at the time of the infamous sack of Balbriggan in 1920. It was subsequently taken over by the Free State Army in October 1922 and in 1945 was taken over by the Air Corps which ran it until 1986. In 1969, Gormanston was used as a refugee camp for those fleeing the troubles in Northern Ireland.
The venue is only 30 miles from Dundalk and 22 miles from Dublin or Navan. That represents a journey of 45 minutes by road from anywhere within an arc from Dundalk to Kells and central Dublin. I understand that there is a site there, currently owned by the Department of Defence, of 270 acres with serviceable runways. There are significant undeveloped agricultural landholdings immediately adjoining the site. Most importantly, the Dublin-Belfast railway line runs along the site's eastern boundary, while the main Dublin-Belfast road, soon to become the M1 motorway, is on the western boundary. I emphasise the location of the existing road and rail infrastructure which would cost billions to construct from scratch today. Gormanston is the only facility in the country adjoining such major transport infrastructure. While it may seem somewhat incongruous in the context of an airport development, Gormanston is also near the Irish Sea, on the other side of the railway line. Such a natural resource can be exploited for future runway development, as we have seen in the case of several international airports around the world.
We should not allow another Harcourt Street line or Navan line situation to develop whereby railways were closed down because the demand did not justify the oversupply of infrastructure at one particular time. We all lived to regret such closures subsequently. It is also important to avoid a posts and telegraphs situation where a huge demand for phone facilities in the 1970s and 1980s totally outstripped supply. The telephone system was in absolute chaos because the necessary infrastructure was not in place. It took a radical measure by the former Taoiseach, Deputy Albert Reynolds, when Minister for Post and Telegraphs, to bring our telecommunications infrastructure into the 20th century. We are all fully aware of the major benefits that accrued. It is important that we are proactive and manage and drive development rather than allow change to be forced upon us and have to react to it.
The cliché, "It is a golden opportunity", is very appropriate in this context. This is an opportunity not to be missed and which I fear will never be repeated. There is a magnificent and totally unique coincidence of natural and man made resources available. There is acre upon acre of flat ground that is perfectly suitable for airport development with very few dwellings located on it. A mainline rail track immediately adjoins the land with two stations adjacent to the site, which by rail is three quarters of an hour from Dublin and an hour and a quarter from Belfast. While we think of it as an addition to Dublin, we are aware of the fortune Ryanair has made during the years by utilising airports such as Stansted, Charleroi and Beauvais, all of which are an hour and a quarter from the cities they serve.
The new M1 motorway also runs adjacent to the site and there is unlimited runway expansion potential. There are prevailing westerly winds which would render the runways largely pollution free in that the vast bulk of traffic would fly into the airport over water and there would be no noise pollution in inhabited areas. I hope the key is that the availability of capital for the necessary funding of the project should not present the difficulties it would have in the past. It appears to be a fantastic opportunity to develop the magnificent confluence of natural and man made resources.
I welcome the Minister and thank him for taking the time to come to the House. I look forward very much to his comments.
