Ms Margaret Marron:

I thank the Chairman and members for the invitation to appear before the joint committee today. I am accompanied by my colleagues Mr. Terry Lynch, Mr. Nigel Hillis and Ms Mary Marron.

We are all members of County Monaghan anti-pylon committee.

As we approach the centenary celebrations of the Easter Rising, it is fitting to recall the words of W.B. Yeats in one of the most powerful political poems of the 20th century:

All changed, changed utterly,

A terrible beauty is born.

The change referred to by Yeats was the 1916 Rising which saw the transformation of ordinary citizens into revolutionaries and the fact that the “terrible beauty” was born in Easter week made it simultaneously a crucifixion and a resurrection. We can very easily identify with the disillusioned Yeats. For the past seven years we have sought to inform and educate ourselves on the implications of EirGrid’s plan to run 400 kV lines on pylons up to 40 m high through our drumlin landscape.

We come here today on the back of a public meeting held last week in Aughnamullen social centre, which is situated right in the heart of Monaghan through which these pylons are proposed. The people we represent are very angry at how they have been treated by EirGrid and the political establishment. They are absolutely infuriated that they are being discriminated against and treated as second class citizens. This is the message we have been tasked with bringing to this forum today and given the passion of the contributions from the floor at that meeting, we feel totally inadequate for the task. We are ordinary people, doing ordinary jobs. We are the people in Yeats’s poem whom he met “at close of day, coming with vivid faces from counter or desk". Like them, I can honestly say we too feel crucified because nobody is listening to our concerns. We have been treated appallingly from the outset. When it becomes apparent that one is just engaging in box-ticking exercises and it would be much easier to give up, we keep going. We do what we do in the best interests of our county, our communities and our future generations.

Last week, Mr. Fintan Slye said that open engagement with communities is a key pillar of the draft strategy but that barriers to effective engagement were being put up. County Monaghan anti-pylon committee has never put up any barriers to effective engagement, in fact, quite the opposite. Maybe he might explain why the issues raised over three days of open engagement, organised by this anti-pylon committee, at which more than 600 people attended in May 2013, were totally ignored. I have here the stamped and dated copy of issues and questions I personally raised and submitted to EirGrid and to which I requested a written response. To date, I have received no reply.

Since the collapse of the oral hearing in June 2010, we met the independent expert commission in July 2011, took part in the Oireachtas committee hearing into the expert commission report in February 2012 and travelled again two weeks later as observers to the Oireachtas committee hearing with the Department of Communications, Energy and Natural Resources. In March 2013, we were on the road again to EirGrid headquarters to discuss our concerns and we met the EirGrid project team a month later in Carrickmacross. In November 2013, we gave a presentation to the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Transport and Communications and were back again for the EirGrid presentation in December. In May 2014, we met the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators in Carrickmacross regarding EirGrid’s consultation review and we met EirGrid again in Carrickmacross in November 2014 to outline our concerns. Meanwhile we were meeting regularly with affected landowners and residents along the proposed route. We have tried to engage openly in a constructive way and if any barriers have been put up, then they have the EirGrid logo on them.

Why the total change for the other projects and not for us? On 4June 2014, the then Minister, Deputy Pat Rabbitte, appeared before this committee to discuss the energy Green Paper and he stated that because the North-South interconnector was so urgent, he would "strip it out" from the debate but other issues could be discussed at leisure. A political decision was made to "strip out" the North-South interconnector.

Mr. Fintan Slye set out the reasons the interconnector was so urgent in his opening statement last week. He said:

The interconnector is needed now, as a cross-Border bottleneck has developed on the all-island electricity system, which is having serious financial consequences. Last year the Economic and Social Research Institute, ESRI, reported that the North-South interconnector would remove the bottleneck and reduce electricity costs by €30 million per year.

At the last oral hearing, EirGrid gave evidence that due to the risk of system separation, the interconnector could not be used to the fullest extent and the maximum power flows were capped at 400 MVA from South to North and 450 MVA from North to South. The bottleneck was in the context of a loss of either one or both circuits resulting in system failure, in other words, a brownout or a complete blackout. According to Mr. Slye, this could occur if a lorry crashed into one of the pylon towers. The daily power flows on the SONI website are consistently well below the 400 or 450 MVA danger zone. No bottleneck currently exists.

Regarding the €30 million saving, EirGrid kindly sent us a web link to the referenced ESRI paper. The document is entitled Irish Energy Policy: An Analysis of Current Issues; Fitzgerald et al. 2014. This paper itself does not directly analyse the impact of a second North-South interconnector but suggests that an earlier ESRI document, by Curtis et al. opines that a second North-South line would result in a €30 million per annum saving within the single electricity market. This Curtis et al. 2013 document is a working paper and comes with a serious health warning: "ESRI working papers represent un-refereed work-in-progress by researchers who are solely responsible for the content and any views expressed therein”. The Curtis et al. paper again references the €30 million savings as coming from other sources, which we have been unable to locate. However, correspondence from EirGrid to an Oireachtas committee in February 2012 throws some light on the issue:

Current cost benefit analysis studies show that in 2017 the presence of a new high capacity North South Interconnector will result in a saving to electricity customers in the region of €20 to €30 million per annum. That saving estimate is based on, among other things, an assumption as to the network configuration in 2017, in particular the amount and location of renewable generation that will be connected to the system. It is not necessarily correct therefore to assume that if the Interconnector was available today that similar cost savings would now accrue.

The key factors are amount and location of renewable generation, namely, wind and the network configuration. These factors have been studied in a very recent report dated March 2015 commissioned by the Irish Wind Energy Association entitled The Value of Wind Energy to Ireland. This report concludes that wind generation will decrease wholesale prices, resulting in savings to the consumer, but will be offset by other system costs. This report states:

It is not transparently clear what proportion of EirGrid’s planned investment in the electricity network is required solely for the development of wind capacity. Nor has it been determined how the system services outlined in the DS3 program will be paid for. But if all these are passed through to customers, they offset the wholesale price benefit, meaning household and industrial electricity prices rise slightly.

We can only conclude that the €30 million saving is dubious at best if not totally delusional. Mr Slye went on to say that, according to their estimates, the North-South line would cost €500 million more to underground than if it were overhead. He quoted a letter from the Commission for Energy Regulation stating that the additional cost would not be acceptable. Does Mr. Slye have a letter from the CER in regard to the extra €500 million to underground Grid Link and Grid West? Does he have a letter from the CER in regard to the €1.2 billion that could be saved if all the cheapest options were chosen with regard to the revised Grid25 strategy? If not, is he expecting a letter from the CER anytime soon and what does he think it might contain?

In any event, we saw from the Irish Water debacle that when push came to shove, the CER was sidelined and political decisions were taken at the highest level. Mr Slye stated that the international expert commission found that AC overhead technology was the “standard” in Europe for implementing projects similar to the North-South interconnector.

The commission never used the word "standard" in this context. It used the word "traditional". It found that AC overhead was the "traditional technical solution" in the context of solutions other than the traditional solution which could be employed to overcome major public resistance to overhead lines.

With regard to implementing projects similar to the North-South line, the commission stated: "When looking at all projects finalized or designed during the last decade in Europe, it becomes clear that for "green field" projects, i.e. connecting two nodes that were not connected before in a 400 kV grid, few have been built by using standard steel high voltage towers".

Reference has been made to the project of common interest, PCI, process. One of the underlying tenets of the PCI process is transparency and enhanced public participation. It has done absolutely nothing to enhance our public participation and its implementation is about as clear as frosted glass. An Bord Pleanála approved EirGrid's concept for public participation in retrospect under Article 9(3) of the authority's manual, despite the fact that no consultation had taken place with regard to an underground route option, a fact admitted by Mr. Slye to this committee last week. The PCI regulations clearly state that they are without prejudice to the Aarhus and Espoo conventions and relevant European Union law. Showing a route corridor on an Ordnance Survey map at a scale of 1:50,000 hidden at the back of the PB Power report does not constitute public consultation.

Mr. Slye commented on the independent expert panel chaired by Mrs. Justice Catherine McGuinness. The panel members are highly intelligent people who are to the forefront in their own fields, and we do not question their integrity. However, we believe EirGrid was economical with the truth in reply to the panel's request for more information regarding the feasibility of undergrounding the line along public roads. The Tobin report, published two days after the panel had made its decision, threw a different light on the topic in respect of using high-voltage direct current cabling. EirGrid subsequently admitted that the panel was not in receipt of the Tobin report, which clearly showed very different information regarding undergrounding.

We have had the vexed issue of repositioning pylons at the 11th hour, with no prior consultation whatsoever with the affected landowners. Despite all the glossy brochures with cute children and babies on the front and promises of a changing culture, we still have the jackboot approach when it comes to this project. The final line and pylon positions were issued to landowners in December 2013 with the objective of submitting a planning application early in 2014. If they were good to go then, why are changes required now? Have they been moved for genuine engineering or design reasons, or is there some other strategy behind it? At the least we deserve an explanation. We do not even know the extent of the pylon changes because in December 2013 the maps were removed from the website. So much for openness and transparency.

In conclusion, our research shows that there will be no security of supply issues in Northern Ireland until at least 2021; there is currently no operational bottleneck; the €30 million saving is illusory; and, according to information in the draft application file, the maximum typical power flow on the interconnector is expected to be 500 MVA.

Mr. Slye admitted last week that undergrounding was feasible in an engineering sense as well as technically feasible and that we had never been consulted on that option. The only urgency with this project is that it needs a proper independent review and consultation, as is the case with Grid West and Grid Link. All we are asking for is fair play and equality of treatment, as is our constitutional right.

This is the revolution of Yeats's poem. We sincerely hope it will not lead down the road to resurrection.