Some residents of Dublin 15 have welcomed news of drone delivery operator Manna’s “strategic pause” on its Irish operations, with noise complaints and concerns around privacy central to local discontent around the service. “They fly right over our back garden,” says Paul Bohan, who lives with his wife Sharon in Coolmine. Last Saturday, the couple’s son visited from Belfast alongside his young daughter. Plans to stage a barbecue in said garden had to be abandoned.“They were just back and forward,” Sharon says of the drones. “You were waiting for them to come back again. It’s absolutely disgraceful that they were let do it. It’s like a tractor going over your head … Since they’re gone, I just feel peace.”“Where we live, it seemed to be nonstop over our house,” Paul adds. “It’s very invasive, I felt.” Manna manufactures drones in Ireland, but is planning further expansion in the United States. In a statement announcing its strategic pause on Friday, Manna cited “the absence of a clear national policy framework” and said the sector’s reliance on local planning processes “created uncertainty around the infrastructure required to support drone delivery at scale”. The company, founded by Irish tech entrepreneur Bobby Healy, says that over the past seven years, it has completed more than 300,000 deliveries in Ireland, with more than 90,000 of them in Dublin 15 alone. Eddie Matthews, who lives in Summerfield Green, Blanchardstown, says he took very little notice of the drones when they started operating in the area. “It got more incessant because the flight path goes over the back of my house and the back of the house in front of me,” he says. Vulnerable people in the area, Matthews says, can be the worst affected by the drones, with the noise and unpredictability of their intrusions causing anxiety. He is pleased but “not ecstatic” about the news of the company pausing its operations.“I’m not anti-progress. And I worked in the health service for 40 years, so I can see the benefits which these could have in a non-commercial sense, but I’m happy from a point of view of comfort and peace and quiet that they’re not operating,” Matthews says. Jamie Ivory and Chloe Lawlor sleep in a converted attic loft in Blanchardstown, where Ivory says the “whirring of the blade is extremely loud”. It sets dogs off in the neighbourhood as well, Lawlor adds. Despite these misgivings, Ivory concedes that the drones seem “fairly popular”. “Judging by the amount of drones that are going by daily, I’d say a lot of people liked it ... But on the other hand, a lot of people disliked it,” he says.Then tánaiste Leo Varadkar at the launch of Manna drone delivery’s Balbriggan operation, with chief executive Bobby Healy, in 2022.