North Runway Technical Group

How not knowing became a defence

Story 11 of 13

In March 2026 a TD asked the Department of Transport who sets the flight paths at Dublin Airport.

Ethna Brogan, the Assistant Secretary in charge of aviation, answered. daa, as operator of the airport, “is responsible for the design and maintenance of flight paths into and out of the airport.” She drew breath. “That is the legal position. The DAA obviously does not have expertise in the design of flight paths”. So AirNav does it “on behalf of the DAA”.

Responsible. Obviously no expertise. Next question.

Remember “obviously”.

The law she meant is European. The airport “shall ensure” the flight procedures are designed and maintained. You can hire someone to do the work. You can’t hire out the responsibility.

Now look at her own Department.

When the Rescue 116 investigators came asking, it told them it “did not have aviation expertise within the Department”, and they told it to get some (story 10 has that one).

In March 2025 the same Assistant Secretary recommended that the Minister sign off the answer. The Department “has sufficient specialist expertise available to it”.

Available to it. Not in it.

So who is in it? We asked what qualifications, skills and training the Department requires of its aviation staff. It sent a staff breakdown by grade: 49 civil servants. The requirements? The records “do not exist”. Instead, a pointer to “The capability framework for generalist grades in the Civil Service”.

Generalist. The same framework whether you oversee aviation safety or farm payments. The Department does hire some specialists directly: economists, engineers, accident investigators. Aviation oversight isn’t one of them. For the rest, the competition is for the grade, not the job. You could make principal officer on a career in food safety, and move across to aviation oversight a month later, with no aviation qualification required. Nothing the Department sent us would stop it.

Forty-nine people, and not one of their roles requires them to know anything about aircraft.

Which raises a question for the Minister. How do you run the aviation divisions of a Department where nobody has to hold an aviation qualification, nobody has to be an expert in aviation safety, and nobody need ever have worked in aviation?

Fine. Train them, then. Even the consultants who called it all robust suggested that. “Consider training staff”, they said, on safety management.

In March 2026 a TD asked the Minister whether there were any “technical training programmes”, and if not, why not. Five paragraphs came back. The regulator. The consultants. Contracted expertise. The statutory examination. Training didn’t come up once.

Training would work, that’s the trouble. Then someone would know.

But they hire it in, don’t they? “When an external view is required, my Department contracts aviation expertise and draws on advice.” So we asked for every time they had since 2020, and whether any of it was to check something the regulator, daa or AirNav had told them.

Nine entries in six years. Six were appeal panels the law obliged the Minister to set up. One was €1,500 on the wording of search and rescue legislation. One was the €38,650 report saying they had enough. And one was the statutory inspection of the Aviation Authority, at a cost of “€0 (Costs recouped to Department of Transport from IAA)”. The regulator paid for its own inspection.

None of the nine is marked as checking a technical letter from the regulator, or daa, or AirNav, with somebody who could tell them whether it was right.

And in case you thought this was just Transport, there was a second review, done in-house. It compared the Department with the others that oversee safety regulators, and found it “comparable”. Then the Minister explained: “Similar to the other departments, the Department of Transport relies on its independent regulator for technical expertise and advice when appropriate.”

So that’s the defence. Everyone else leans on the people they’re meant to be watching too. Thanks, colleagues.

We’d love to read that review. In the copy released to us, its description is blacked out. The officials chose to call it “outside scope”. No exemption cited.

So, here’s where we’ve landed. The airport is responsible for routes it obviously can’t design. The Department is responsible for a regulator it isn’t required to understand. Its 49 aviation staff need no aviation qualification and no aviation training, and in six years none of its outside experts is recorded as checking what it’s told. Its own review says the other departments are just the same. The accident investigators said that if you outsource, you must know enough to be an intelligent customer. daa outsourced. The Department outsourced. Neither bought the intelligence.

There’s a logic to it. Know enough to check the work, and someone can ask why you didn’t. Obviously not know, and all you can say is what the legal position is.

In Ireland, responsibility is the legal position. Knowing what you’re responsible for is optional, and on the record, it’s safer not to.

Sources
← Story 10: How a recommendation to get expertise became a report saying you don’t need it
Story 12: How a warning letter became somebody else’s idea →