Sir, You'd never get away with it at the Olympics. Can't you Just picture it after the race has been started, they then announce the rules? The Minister for the Environment, Mr Howlin has just stated that mobile telephone masts in future should not be sited in residential areas or close to schools, unless no other site is available.
A few hundred yards from my home, Telecom got permission for a massive radio base at its training centre, in 1990. It's slap bang in the middle of a residential area, and next door to a girls' secondary school and a third level college. It is 24 metres high, looks like an oil rig because it has a working platform on top, and towers over our area. Telecom gets retention permission with monotonous regularity from An Bord Pleanala, despite cart loads of objections from local residents associations.
When Telecom was given a concession by the Government, which allowed it to put up masts without permission for six months, it made hay. A close friend of mine came home one day to find herself living beside a pile of metal, on a very residential road in Dublin.
In America, mobile phone masts are not allowed on Federal property, nor in residential areas, near schools, or hospitals. Why? because of radiation levels. Our standards fall way below that. It is no comfort to hear Telecom say that it considers the levels safe they would, wouldn't they? The bottom line for them is profit, for us it's health. Yours etc., Drumcondra, Dublin 9.