Ireland must pause its planned operational restrictions at Dublin Airport after the Commission finds the approval process failed to properly consider less restrictive noise-reduction alternatives
April 13th, 2026 – The European Commission has issued Decision (EU) 2026/836, finding that Ireland did not follow the procedure required under EU law before moving to introduce operational restrictions at Dublin Airport. The Decision, adopted on 10 February 2026 and addressed solely to Ireland, stops short of outright prohibition, but requires Irish authorities to review the Decision and inform the Commission of their intentions before any restrictions are introduced.
The background to this case dates to August 2025, when Ireland formally notified the Commission of its intention to impose noise-related operational restrictions at Dublin Airport under Regulation (EU) No 598/2014, the EU’s framework for managing aircraft noise at Union airports through what it terms a “balanced approach.” That approach requires Member States to consider a hierarchy of measures, from noise reduction at source and land-use planning to operating procedures, before resorting to direct operational restrictions such as night flight caps.
The measures Ireland proposed had their origin in a regulatory decision by Ireland’s Aircraft Noise Competent Authority (ANCA), issued in June 2022. ANCA’s package included a night-time noise quota system (covering 23:00–06:59), a restriction on use of the northern runway between midnight and 05:59, and a voluntary residential soundproofing grant scheme. An appeal body, An Coimisiún Pleanála (ACP), subsequently upheld ANCA’s noise reduction objective but went further: it introduced an additional noise metric, LAmax, which captures individual noise events and their effect on sleep interruption, and on that basis, added a hard cap of 35,672 night movements per year.
It is this additional movement cap that the Commission finds procedurally deficient. The ACP introduced the new metric and immediately moved to a new operational restriction without first assessing whether the other pillars of the balanced approach (source-based measures, land use planning, or operational procedures) could have achieved the same noise reduction objective. That prior assessment is a mandatory step under Article 5(3) of Regulation (EU) No 598/2014. When the Commission asked Ireland directly whether the ACP had considered less restrictive alternatives incorporating the LAmax metric, the answer was that only the measures already before it had been evaluated.
The Commission ultimately ruled that the process was not compliant with EU law, and Irish authorities must now review the Decision and report back before proceeding. The Commission also signals that this Decision does not foreclose further scrutiny, meaning that, should Ireland fail to bring the process into conformity, further enforcement actions could be taken.
