Ireland’s aviation regulator has said it will ignore the 32 million annual passenger cap at Dublin Airport next summer pending a resolution on the dispute over the matter in the courts.
The Irish Aviation Authority (IAA) published its draft decision on Dublin Airport’s summer 2026 capacity on Thursday.
Planners imposed the cap in 2007 as a condition of allowing airport operator DAA to build a second terminal at Dublin, to address fears of traffic congestion.
The High Court suspended the cap’s implementation earlier this year when it referred questions raised in a legal challenge by airlines including Ryanair and Aer Lingus to the European courts.
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“As a result of the High Court’s granting of the order in the terms set out above, the IAA has not taken account of [the passenger cap] in this draft decision, and consequently does not propose to include a seasonal seat cap coordination parameter for summer 2026,” it said.
European courts are due to scrutinise key elements of the limit and are widely expected to axe it.
What can we potentially look forward to in Budget 2026?
The IAA’s draft decision on summer capacity will now be used in the airport slot allocation process.
The proposed parameters define how many aircraft may be scheduled to use Dublin Airport at a particular time. The summer 2026 scheduling season runs from March to October inclusive.
The slot regulation system aims to ensure that, where airport capacity is scarce, the maximum available capacity is identified and distributed in a fair and transparent way by means of the allocation of take-off and landing slots by an independent coordinator.
“The proposed coordination parameters will support increased competition by allowing for up to 25 additional daily slots to be allocated by the independent slot coordinator, but without degrading the current service quality,” the IAA said.
