Cathal Crowe (Clare, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the officials from the Department and ComReg and thank them for the presentation and the briefing notes that were emailed to us. This Bill hopes to achieve five strands but I will hone in on one of them. On Monday morning I was out doing my clinics in Clare and somebody gave me a volume of paperwork about mobile phone masts. I brushed it off and said we have been there and heard all of that. We have heard all the tinfoil hat people, heard all of that and we have rubbished it. I said I was not convinced by this. Nonetheless, I took a few pieces of paper and said I would bring them to the committee because they are from eminent sources. I said I am not into the hysterical stuff, only stuff that has come from eminent sources.

I refer the officials to Article 30(6) mentioned in the general scheme as I have a few points to make on it. This relates to breaches representing an "immediate and serious threat to public safety, public security or public health or risks creating serious economic or operational problems for other providers or users of [ECN, ECS] or other users of the radio spectrum". Essentially, there is a framework here that provides protection to ensure things are within compliance levels, certainly with respect to non-ionising radiation and all the outputs of these radio signals.

Going back to Monday, I was given a volume of paperwork. I chose to omit much of it. This lady is from the Chairman's constituency and might be in contact with him very shortly as well. I want to reference a few of these documents because about a decade ago we quite rightly eased most of the planning criteria required for mobile phone network infrastructure. We were right to do so. Every one of us has a mobile phone. We need them and need to be able to use them actively when we are on the move without networks crashing. I am glad there is an aim nationally to have all populated parts of Ireland receiving a 5G signal by 2030 and I hope we get to that point even sooner. In the rush to get to a low-regulation ending so we could fast-track delivery of this, certain things may have been surrendered. I put them as questions even though we may not have the answers to them in this meeting.

In June 2005 the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Communications, Marine and Natural Resources, a precursor to this one, submitted a report to the Government of the day. It said:

The Joint Committee makes the observation that the planning processes for the erection of masts would not appear to be an open and transparent procedure. The Joint Committee recommends that all planning guidelines and exemptions be re-examined with a view to ensuring that no ‘electromagnetic emitting’ or ‘radio frequency emitting’ equipment is sited near health centres, schools or other sensitive sites such as playgrounds or pitches etc.

That was 16 years ago. That no longer applies. The thrust of my contribution is while it is right to ease planning restrictions to allow infrastructure so critical to Ireland to exist and to do so in all parts of the country rather than just urban areas, at the same time, some of the prior health concerns need to remain under a lens of scrutiny.

The next item I will reference comes from the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. It was published ten years ago. It states:

While electrical and electromagnetic fields in certain frequency bands have wholly beneficial effects which are applied in medicine, other non-ionising frequencies, whether from extremely low frequencies, power lines or certain high frequency waves used in the fields of radar, telecommunications and mobile telephony, appear to have more or less potentially harmful, non-thermal, biological effects on plants, insects and animals as well as the human body ...

I will stop there.

As I said, I was given this volume of evidence. I did not accept most of it but are were certain eminent reports that need to remain under scrutiny. I think the scientific debate on this was largely shut about ten years ago. I tell ComReg and the Department that it needs to remain. There needs to be a capacity here. It is not all about infrastructure and consumers. There needs to be a capacity to stay current with the technology and the potential health risks - which hopefully do not exist - that some eminent bodies, including the Irish Medical Organisation, IMO, have in the past identified. Have the officials' organisations the capacity to do that? Have they the public health capacity to make decisions and to monitor at this level? Without that, the legislation, when enacted, will be rather limp.

I have two further points and will then conclude. The principle of co-location also came in about a decade ago. It was a very good principle and ensured that in the part of County Clare I live in, which is similar to many parts of Ireland where there is a large population, companies had to work with each other and share space on a mast. We all want to see antennae that give us a good signal but we do not want to see all these ugly masts popping up here, there and everywhere. Proliferation of them certainly is not needed. That principle was largely followed a decade ago but has been largely abandoned in the last two or three years. Again, in my locality there are now about 18 antennae, masts and poles. When I leave Ennis and drive four or five miles west, there is nothing. There is disappearing infrastructure.