Looking Up: Why Solving Everyday Problems Requires New Kinds of Infrastructure

Manna’s air delivery system offers an alternative approach to transporting goods in suburban areas, supporting local businesses and residents.

Ireland’s infrastructure debate is finally catching up with what many people experience every day.

Congestion that turns short trips into long ones. Suburbs built for growth but lacking the transport, services and access to support that growth—communities where distance, traffic and time pressure quietly shape who can participate fully in daily life.

As Sean O’Driscoll of the Government’s Accelerating Infrastructure Taskforce recently put it, our country has grown, our population has grown, but our infrastructure has not kept pace. He is right. And while that discussion is often framed in terms of economic competitiveness or lost investment, the reality is more human than that. Infrastructure gaps show up first in people’s routines – how they get food, medicine, childcare support, or simply a moment back in their day.

This is where new forms of infrastructure matter.

At Manna, we’ve spent the past seven years building a new kind of short-range transport system for suburban life. Not hobby drones, but autonomous, airline-grade aircraft designed and built in Ireland, operating under European aviation safety rules and overseen by trained operators. The goal is not novelty. It is to solve a very practical problem: how to move small, everyday goods quickly and safely without adding more pressure to already overburdened roads.

For independent businesses, the impact is immediate. A café, butcher or pharmacy can reach thousands of nearby households in minutes without hiring drivers, managing vehicles or absorbing fuel and insurance costs. Orders that would never justify a car journey suddenly make sense. Local shops can compete on speed and reliability without relocating to high-rent, high-traffic areas. We have served 47 businesses in Dublin 15, most of them Irish-owned and independent, and many now deeply value the service.

But the deeper impact is on people.

Suburban Ireland includes older residents, people with mobility challenges, families balancing work and childcare, and households without cars. For many, access is not a question of convenience but of feasibility. Distance, traffic, and time constraints quietly exclude people from local commerce and services. Urban planners often talk about the “15-minute city”, where daily needs are close at hand. Air delivery brings that benefit to suburbs too, helping local businesses reach customers faster and making communities more accessible and liveable for families, older people and those with limited mobility, without adding pressure to roads or infrastructure.

We see this reflected in how the service is used. Parents ordering essentials without leaving children unattended. Older customers maintain independence. People with limited mobility are accessing local shops that would otherwise be out of reach. These are not edge cases – they are everyday realities in growing suburbs. During the pandemic in Oranmore and Moneygall, we delivered prescriptions to people in isolation. Today, tighter chain-of-custody requirements mean prescription delivery is not currently part of the service, but we expect this to evolve over time. In the meantime, those same safeguards allow us to deliver antigen tests and other non-prescription goods safely and securely.

This year, one of the most heartening things for me personally has been the messages of support we’ve received from pregnant mothers in the later stages of pregnancy and early motherhood, parents of children who find public environments difficult, and, more recently, people unable to leave their homes due to illness as the flu season has taken hold.

That reality became especially clear earlier this year when more than 1,000 people emailed their local representatives in support of our service. Those messages did not focus on technology. They focused on time saved, stress reduced, independence preserved, and local businesses supported. In other words, on infrastructure, doing what it is supposed to do: making daily life work better. It’s why 52,000 people have used the service in Dublin 15 in nearly 2years. In total, we have done nearly 250,000 deliveries in Ireland, Finland and Texas.

This matters because our existing delivery infrastructure is failing on several fronts at once. Road congestion continues to worsen. Delivery vehicles contribute disproportionately to local air pollution. Accident risk rises when time-pressured driving increases. Suburban streets were never designed to absorb endless growth in van and car movements. 

By contrast, moving suitable journeys into the air reduces pressure across the system. Each electric flight replaces a road journey, with no idling, no parking, and no tailpipe emissions. Independent research from Maynooth University shows an 87% reduction in carbon emissions compared to traditional road delivery. Less traffic also means safer streets, particularly at peak times when children are outside and families are returning home.

None of this is to suggest that new infrastructure should avoid scrutiny. It shouldn’t. Questions about noise, privacy and safety are reasonable and deserve evidence-based answers. That is why we publish independent acoustic studies, design aircraft specifically for low-noise flight, and operate under strict European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) rules. Trinity College Dublin’s research shows our aircraft are audible only briefly and at levels comparable to background traffic noise, while privacy protections are designed into how the system operates. We are fully GDPR compliant. Cameras activate only for a few seconds during the final delivery phase, operate at lower resolution than commonly available mapping imagery, such as Google Maps, and are limited solely to the customer’s delivery area. No personal data is recorded or retained.

What matters is how a society chooses to respond to innovation. Sean O’Driscoll has warned that Ireland cannot keep asking a growing country to operate inside infrastructure built for a smaller one. That applies not just to major projects, but to everyday systems that quietly determine quality of life.

Air delivery is an example of infrastructure that can be deployed quickly, safely and at relatively low cost –  not instead of roads, rail or housing, but alongside them. It is infrastructure that scales with population growth rather than fighting it.

Ireland is well placed to lead in this space. Today, Manna employs over 160 people across software, aerospace engineering, operations and safety – all based here and leading the world in air innovation alongside Silicon Valley giants like Amazon, Wing and Zipline. We build our aircraft and fleet-management software in-house. Europe’s regulatory framework has enabled this ambition rather than constrained it, allowing Irish companies to operate commercially while many global players remain years behind.

Ireland has always succeeded when it backed ambitious solutions to real problems and applied high standards in doing so. The challenge now is not whether we need more infrastructure, but whether we are open to forms of infrastructure that are quieter, cleaner and better suited to how people actually live. Manna’s role is a small one amid Ireland’s wider infrastructure headwinds, but we remain committed to navigating it constructively with policymakers.

For many families, older residents and small businesses, this is not about technology for its own sake. It is about access, participation and time. It is about infrastructure that shows up in everyday life, not just in reports.

Sometimes, solving grounded problems requires us to look up.

Business & Finance Awards 2025

Presented by Jenny Melia, CEO of Enterprise Ireland, Manna Air Delivery was honoured with the Elevation Award in recognition of its innovative approach to logistics and its impact on improving access to goods for communities and local businesses.