Sir, – EirGrid's announcement ("EirGrid set to relaunch regional network upgrade", Front Page, June 23rd) that it will unveil a potential underground route for their Grid West electricity transmission project between points in Roscommon and Mayo brings to mind Seamus Mallon's sardonic comment about the Belfast Agreement and slow learners.
It has taken EirGrid more than six years to get to this point. In 2008, it announced a grid reinforcement and interconnector project to run from Meath to Tyrone. When challenged as to why it had not considered the option of putting the cables underground, its response was that it was not technically feasible. It dropped that claim and replaced it with another that said it might be feasible, but the underground option would cost 20 times more. Then they said 12 times more. Then 10 times, then eight, and the last time I checked they had come down to around two to three times more expensive.
Each change in policy at government level and by EirGrid has been linked to the imminence of an election. It took the 2011 general election for the North East Pylon Pressure Campaign to wrest a commitment from the incoming Fine Gael and Labour Government that an independent panel of international experts in electricity transmission would examine feasibility and cost.
The experts unequivocally stated that the underground option was feasible. They reckoned that a direct comparison of the capital cost of overhead to underground favoured overhead by a factor of three. However, they conceded that they had not considered the other indirect costs associated with overhead – such as devaluation of houses and farms – because this issue was beyond their technical competence.
This year’s local and European elections prompted the announcement by Minister for Energy Pat Rabbitte of an independent panel, chaired by Catherine McGuinness, to oversee a detailed examination by EirGrid of whether it was viable to put the cables underground. It is on foot of the establishment of this panel that EirGrid has made its announcement.
The announcement is, of course, to be welcomed. A similar study will now be carried out for the Grid Link project that is to run from Cork to Kildare. Yet Mr Rabbitte excluded the pylons project that could run across Meath, Monaghan and Cavan from the terms of reference on the basis that the project was “too far advanced”.
The real reason was that, unlike along the other proposed transmission corridors, the Coalition public representatives in the northeast were spineless in their failure to support the people affected by the proposals. Mr Rabbitte responded to where the most political pressure came from, but did no more than that.
The Minister’s exclusion of the northeast from the ambit of the McGuinness review panel is unfair. It means that only two out of the three proposed overhead pylon projects will be independently evaluated – even though all three are similar technically.
It would be supremely ironic if the only area of the country that ended up saddled with new pylons was the northeast, which pioneered and led the campaign to highlight the underground alternative. It is still not too late to amend the review panel’s terms of reference to remedy this injustice. But will it take yet another election – this time a general election sometime prior to March 2016 – to secure fair play for the people of the northeast? – Yours, etc,
LIAM CAHILL,
Clowanstown,
Drumree,
Co Meath.