We asked daa for all of its noise monitoring data, every monitor and every flight, from 2019 to today. daa refused most of it. For the part it will release it wants €560. And the year it refused to show us is 2023, the year Fingal County Council now proposes to measure Dublin Airport’s noise from.
That data is how anyone outside daa could check what the North Runway has done to the people under it. We have shown what it can do. Our new tool, Overhead, was built from one year of it. daa’s answer to a volunteer group doing the work is to make the next year cost money, and the years before that unavailable.
What we already built from one year
Previously, in March 2026, we asked daa for a year of the noise its monitors recorded from North Runway departures. daa released twelve months, March 2025 to February 2026: 364,831 noise events, each matched to a flight.
From that we built a model of how loud each aircraft type is at each distance from the ground, the LAmax model in our studies. We put it with real flown tracks and census population. Overhead uses the same model to show what a day of North Runway departures would sound like over your own street.
As far as we know, nobody else has done this. daa publishes averages, and contours drawn from its own model. Nobody has published what each flight measured, set against the people who live under it.
It should not have been left to us. When Fingal, acting as the Aircraft Noise Competent Authority (ANCA), made its 2022 noise decision for the North Runway, it required that “All noise modelling shall be validated using local noise and track keeping performance data from the Airport’s systems.” The 2007 planning permission said that the monitoring results “shall be used to re-evaluate noise impacts”. So we asked daa for its comparison between the noise its permission predicted for these departures and the noise it measured. It said its compliance report contains forecast contours “but does not include noise level comparison”. “No other records were identified.”
That comparison should have been made before the routes changed. It has not been made since. So we are doing it, and for that we need the data.
How one question became the whole airport
It started with our neighbours. In 2022 the North Runway’s departures began turning over north Dublin and Meath, over people nobody had asked about these routes. Some of us know aviation, so they came to us with one question: why did somebody think it made sense to send the aircraft over the roughly 30,000 people who live within 3 km of these routes?
We expected to find an answer. We went looking for the study that chose the turn, the assessment that weighed it, and the regulator that checked it. What we found is in our stories. Nobody assessed the switch to these routes. Each body points to another as the one responsible. The Minister told the Dáil that the noise regulator “has taken no enforcement actions”. In September Fingal decided that “flight paths are not development”, so on its reading no planning permission governs them at all.
Every answer made the next question bigger. To check daa’s noise figures, we built our own model from daa’s measurements. To get the records, we made the requests described below. We now have a complaint open with the European Commission (EC), and we asked Fingal, under section 5 of the planning acts, whether flying these routes needed planning permission.
The more we learned, the less any of it held up. So we stopped asking only about our own route. None of the method we built cares which runway a flight uses.
We didn’t ask for one runway, or for the monitors near us. We asked for every monitor daa runs, every arrival and departure on every runway, around the clock, from 1 January 2019. The numbers that run Dublin Airport’s noise rules all come from models: the day and night averages (Lden and Lnight), the contours that decide who gets insulation, and the counts the noise objective is measured by. The public has never been given the measurements to check them. With the full record we could rebuild every one of those figures independently, from what the monitors actually recorded, and see if they hold up.
One year of departures from one runway leaves most of the airport out. The full record would let us model:
- arrivals, which the first release did not include at all
- departures from the South Runway
- days when the wind is from the east and the airport turns round
- landings on 28L and departures off 10R, and what they mean for places like Clongriffin
- what changed between the years, and why
If the routes were got this wrong for the people under the North Runway, we doubt we are the only ones. We may go further, and ask a question nobody seems to have asked about Dublin: if an airport this size were laid out and run by people trying to keep its noise off homes, what would it look like?
Why 2019 to today
The years matter most. The noise objective Fingal set in 2022 measures against 2019, the last full year before Covid and before the North Runway opened. It said that the number of people exposed above 55 dB at night and 65 dB across the day “shall be reduced compared to 2019”.
It hasn’t been. On Fingal’s own figures, the people exposed to night noise above 55 dB went from 1,533 in 2019 to 7,537 in 2025.
So Fingal now proposes to “re-baseline” against 2023, because 2023 represents “the airport in its current form”. The promise to reduce that headcount compared to 2019 is “replaced by a requirement to monitor”, with “the expectation that measures will be used”. While reducing it was a requirement, the number went up nearly fivefold. Now that it’s only an expectation, it can only get better!
2023 is the first full year of the North Runway, and the routes that changed in February that year. Measure from 2023 and the noise from the North Runway is part of the starting line. Everything it caused is already in the baseline.
That is why we asked for 2019, 2023 and the most recent year at the very least. Without 2019 you can’t see what changed. Without 2023 you can’t test the new starting line.
What daa said
We sent the request on 29 June 2026. Two weeks later daa told us that, in its current form, it was likely to be “manifestly unreasonable”, and invited us to narrow it.
We didn’t narrow it. daa then gave its own estimate of the work. The core noise data for one year: about 3 hours. The same data for all seven and a half years: about 17 hours. Two working days of specialist time. At that point its estimate of the fee for what it proposed to release was €240 to €320.
On 28 August, the last day allowed, daa decided. It would release 2019 and the most recent year. It refused the rest, as a “disproportionate level of specialist technical effort”. The price for what it would release: €560, for 28 hours of work.
And 2023? daa will give us the 2023 flight tracks. It won’t give us the noise those flights made.
We asked for an internal review. On 29 September daa affirmed everything. The refused years would take “approximately 38 hours” more, which would “significantly interfere with the team’s normal activities”.
We had offered daa a way to save those hours: send us the data raw, as it comes out of the system. We don’t need it tidied up. daa refused. It “considers it necessary to undertake proportionate verification checks” first, because unchecked data could be “undermining confidence in daa’s noise monitoring and reporting”.
And the checking goes on our bill. The 28 hours daa charges for include “checking the completeness of the 66GB of retrieved material”. The 38 hours it says the refused years would take include “undertaking proportionate checks” too. So daa decides the data has to be checked before we can see it, charges us for the checking, and counts the checking towards the burden that justifies refusing the rest.
The rules say any charge must be reasonable, so we told daa what €560 means to us: it “stops an unfunded residents’ group obtaining the operator’s own noise measurements”. The reviewer told us a fee “may be reduced having regard to the means of the requester, on production of supporting evidence, such as a medical card”. Our group does not have a medical card, mostly because it is an unfunded voluntary group, not a patient.
The reviewer did accept that there is a public interest in letting communities “assess the relationship between monitored noise and modelled contours”. That is what we have been doing. Then the reviewer decided that daa’s own reports, and Fingal’s oversight, are enough.
We already pay the price for daa’s North Runway routing choices every day. We won’t be paying daa a penny.
daa says the work is done. The data, “over 66 GB”, has been extracted and checked. It will be released “within five working days of receipt of the fee”. Until we pay, daa holds it.
daa considers itself entitled to charge. We don’t agree. Europe’s rules allow a charge for supplying information, of no more than “a reasonable amount”. They also expect public bodies to put environmental information out without anyone having to ask, in electronic databases “easily accessible to the public”. The minimum list of what has to go out includes “data or summaries of data derived from the monitoring of activities affecting, or likely to affect, the environment”. An airport’s noise monitors are exactly that.
What daa actually offers the public is WebTrak: aircraft moving on a map, live readings at the monitors, a replay that goes back 90 days, and no download. Its Library tab says “The following reports are available for you to download.” Nothing is listed underneath.
This data should be on daa’s website for anyone to download, without asking. Instead it takes €560, and months of letters, to ask for part of it. We have appealed to the Commissioner for Environmental Information, at a cost of another €50.
It isn’t only daa. On a separate request, for the Department of Transport’s 2017 and 2018 records on how Fingal County Council came to be chosen as the competent authority for airport noise, the Department estimated about €200 on 24 August, then charged €340 on 24 September for 17 hours of “search and retrieval”. We paid under protest the next day, to get the records. On 10 October we asked for the €340 back.
The endurance test
Europe’s rules on environmental information say a public body must make it available “as soon as possible”. A month is the outside limit, not the target.
That isn’t how it works here. Since May 2025 we have made 42 requests for information to seven public bodies. More than twenty have needed an internal review, and nineteen are now on appeal to the Commissioner. daa alone has had thirteen requests since March. It extended ten of them by a month, and decided seven of those in the last four days of the extended time.
Every request is a long, careful document, because a loose one gets a narrow answer or a nil. Then comes the extension, the decision at the end of the second month, the internal review, and the appeal. Each step has its own deadline, and each deadline binds us. Miss one by a day and the right is gone, and you start again. Ask again, and you are asking about the same subject as before. Do that and they can refuse.
daa has an answer for that too. It told the Commissioner that we “submitted 11 highly detailed and complex AIE requests over a three-month period”. The requests are detailed because nothing less gets an answer. There are many of them because every answer leads to the next question. Each one we sent daa tests something daa or the State has said in public, or a rule daa is bound by. Some, like the monitor data, ask for information we should never have had to ask for at all.
A right meant to give people quick access to information about their own environment has become an endurance game. Keep up with every date, appeal every refusal, and maybe you win the prize, a year later. Drop out, and you lose.
We haven’t dropped out.