Ms Helena Fitzgerald:

When my group, Save Our Heartland, became aware of the pylon routes through the county we managed to have a meeting with the county manager. It was debated in a council meeting in October and at that meeting the county manager offered to commission an independent impact assessment of each of the four routes through the county. He reported to the November council meeting and his report contained a number of recommendations which the council has chosen to adopt. The most important one from Carlow's perspective, and given the huge lack of consistency in how landscape is mapped from county to county, is that Carlow County Council voted to embark on a process to vary the county development plan to strengthen our landscape character assessment. That is an important step for Carlow in trying to make the EirGrid mapping more fair. There was a recommendation to the council to prepare its own constraints report on each route for the county. To a degree, it takes pressure off the local groups because we have been commissioning expert reports to submit to EirGrid, so for the council to do work on our behalf is a good move as well.