Dublin Airport New Runway/Infrastructure.

One of the only bits of forward planning ever done in this country is to acquire the lands etc for the North Runway years ago.

This is an absolute no brainer. Buy it.

Given the inflated price that Ulick and his gang are seeking, it might make more sense for the DAA to point out that they can simply seek a CPO as and when the land is actually needed, and that the current zoning makes any non-airport related development on the land almost impossible.

If nothing else, it might help deflate the price to a level that makes it a bit more reasonable for the DAA to purchase at.

Yeah, something like 1.7m per acre! But that was a site that could be turned into anything really, considering it’s location! If the land to the west is zoned for airport use as the article says, then there is only one potential buyer which really drives the price down!

Wouldn’t surprise me if they settled for 250/300M in the end….! Way below the valuation given to the car park, but prob above what the DAA see as “market value”?!?!

I’d say that’s possibly how it will play out, some sort of middle ground price. Though if the parties are as far apart as suggested above, who knows. I don’t know the ins and outs of CPOs, but presumably if the land was sold to someone other than the DAA, that price would go some way toward setting the “market value” in the event of a CPO in the future ?

I was just over on Flightradar24 and found a reviews section for Dublin

Must admit I'm stunned that it gets consistent 4 & 5 star ratings for getting to the airport. It's almost universally condemned on the Irish transport/infrastructure websites. Now maybe FR24 contributors are a bit different to the average airport punter but still...

Yeah, credit where it's due – transport links notwithstanding, Dublin Airport is far from the worst.

The main thing missing is a train service. The current Metrolink proposal has links to both the DART and National Rail, though I suspect I may be six feet under by the time it is actually built.

"McEvaddy said they want what is best for the country. "We're not going to be extortionists; the national interest [is what] we've always been about” - is a hilarious way of trying to frame his literal landhoarding and extortion efforts. I'm sure the DAA's offer of €20mn would have more than covered his purchase cost of the land, if he was such a good samaritan so eager to help out the national interest.

It sounds awfully like someone trying to put a positive spin on a terrible investment. He bought the land 27 years ago. I don't have the figure for how much revenue the land has generated in that time but I'd hazard a very strong guess its minimal given its location, use and zoning. And theres now the prospect of the DAA not buying the land for _another_ 20+ years...

Whats happened in reality here I'd suspect is McEvaddy bought the land in the mid-1990s thinking the old 1950s-1980s style brown envelope state property way of doing business would let him extort the state for a huge profit in a few years time. But thankfully times changed in the 2000s, we've cleaned up a lot of that corruption, and hes been left holding the bag for decades. So hes now finally giving up.

It's already zoned for airport use, and currently being used for agriculture.

Outside of what you've listed, the only other thing I could see it possibly getting permission for would be airport parking

The extended operating hours for the north runway started today but, from 1900 local, single-runway operations resumed.

Just read the John Burns piece in the I.T. Its one of the worst transport pieces I have ever seen, and that's saying a lot.

Just for starters, take Baldonnel as a 2nd Dublin Airport: the approach to the main runway is over tens of thousands of South Sublin houses, which would make the complains about 10L/28R at DUB utterly trvial. And to say that Baldonnel is close to the LUAS is just a joke.

Rubbish article. Doesn't address any of the major issues with Baldonnel - conflict with DUB flight paths, ridiculously cramped site, proximity of mountains, and of course NOISE as there are hundreds if not thousands of times more households affected than there are by the north DUB runway.

Its continued existence is only tolerable because it is so little used.

Also peddles the nonsense that having two airports in a city is better than one - Belfast has two crap airports with the result that plenty of people go to DUB for greater choice of destinations and lower fares.

The Irish Times publishes a front page advertisement for private jets about once a month – sometimes in the same issue as articles about the climate crisis. The level of hypocrisy is quite outstanding.

The media need to dig a lot deeper than they do when airing these old chestnuts.

Few cities have two airports by design - where they do exist it's usually a product of history and, in the case of major metropolitan areas like London, Paris or New York, a reflection of the size of a catchment population that probably could not be catered for by a single airport. As regards Baldonnel (even leaving aside the noise issues and high ground to the south), it is landlocked on two sides at least by major roads and industrial parks and has only limited space for expansion, particularly of the ramp and runways. When USAF C-17s were handled there for the recent POTUS visit they had to park on the cross-runway, could not use the parallel taxiway for runway 28 and so had to backtrack and make a tight turn at the end of the runway for departure. Those bound for the US had to stop at Shannon for fuel because of the limited runway length. Arguably a development of Baldonnel would for practical purposes be a new-build airport by the time it was ready for business.