Eamon Gilmore (Dún Laoghaire, Labour) | Oireachtas source

The issue of whether the lines should be overground or underground arose previously in the case of power lines between Meath and Tyrone. In line with the commitment we gave in the programme for Government, on 5 July 2011, the Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources announced an international commission of experts to review and report within six months on the cost of and case for putting underground all or part of the Meath-Tyrone 400 kV power line. After considering the merits of overhead and underground options, the report notes that there is no single right solution and that technical solutions must be project specific. The report did not recommend any particular technical option, but it did recommend against putting an alternating current cable wholly underground. It provided its expert views on the feasible technology options available for consideration for the Meath-Tyrone project, including high voltage direct current technology, given the changes in technology suppliers and costs in recent years. In that context, the commission estimated that the cost of implementing the project as a HVDC underground cable option would be three times the cost of the traditional overhead line option, while noting that cost estimates are always uncertain.

A number of national and international health and scientific agencies have reviewed more than 30 years of research into electromagnetic fields, and none of these agencies has concluded that exposure to EMF from overhead power lines is a cause for long-term adverse effects. In October 2005, the World Health Organization convened an international expert panel to review the scientific literature on the biological effects of exposure to extremely low frequency fields. In March 2007, the Department of Communications, Marine and Natural Resources assembled a panel of independent scientists to review EMF and radio frequency research. The position was restated again by the Office of the Chief Scientific Adviser in a report into possible health effects of exposure to electric and magnetic fields in July 2010. There is a quite a degree of both national and international reviews of the likely health effects, none of which reaches the conclusions Deputy Healy has put on record.

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