The Irish Air Line Pilots Association (IALPA) has stated that existing Customs and Border Protection (CBP) facilities at Dublin airport are "more than sufficient" for the airport's annual 32 million passenger per annum cap.
Questioning the need for the expanded CBP facility in a submission to Fingal County Council, Director of Safety & Technical at IALPA, David Morrissey says that IALPA has demonstrated that the current US CBP facility "no longer suffers from congestion issues".
Mr Morrissey states that new procedures introduced for managing the queues in April 2023 "has resulted in no overflow queuing within Pier 4 and that the historical queues and congestion have been eliminated".
He said that as a result, the proposed expanded CBP facility is not urgently required.
Mr Morrissey said that the expanded CBP facility is no longer congested and that a radical change to security screening policy combined with controlled passenger flows via improved terminal Flight Information Service "is proving transformative".
On the new planning application, Mr Morrissey states that "this watershed application absorbs current contact stand space, duplicates main terminal facilities and adds further compaction of the south apron".
Mr Morrissey contends that "in order to protect future development, daa, charged with protecting the national gateway, has a stark choice - either allow a private airline consortium to thwart T2 Phase 2 expansion or resign itself to the fact that base airline requirements effectively control airport development".
He stated that in nutshell, Safety & Technical at IALPA ask in the interests of proper planning and development of the area that Fingal County Council protect and preserve T2 Phase 2 footprint for terminal expansion.
"Otherwise, notions of increasing the airport terminal capacity cap from 32m passengers per annum to 40 million passengers per annum may prove elusive when justifying the same to An Bord Pleanala," he warned.
However, underlining the strain on the existing CBP facilities, planning consultants for daa, Coakley O’Neill have told Fingal County Council that the CBP overflow queuing system was required to be used five out of every seven days in the Summer of 2022 andis projected to be required even more this Summer.
In a planning report lodged with the application, Coakley O’Neill went on to state that the overflow queuing system "is inefficient and confusing for passengers with US bound and rest of world bound passengers frequently becoming concerned about getting through security to board their flights on time".
The consultants state that 1.7m passengers are projected to use the CBP facility in 2023 which is a 13pc increase on the number of people who used the facility in 2022.
Coakley O’Neill state that "is is therefore the case that the current CBP facility does not have the capacity to cater for the existing passengers".
Reporting by Gordon Deegan
