Pat Rabbitte (Dublin South West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I agree with Senator Quinn that we need more debate on this issue. As Senator Mullen said, the genesis of this plan by EirGrid to deliver a safe and secure energy supply to the country goes back to 2008. This is the first time that I have been involved in debating the issue in the Oireachtas. I was in the House a couple of weeks ago to take an Adjournment debate that was prompted by protests locally. This is the first debate on the issue. From that point of view I could not welcome the debate more.

People are greatly motivated by the protests and so on. They are not dissimilar to the protests we have seen at the time of the masts in respect of the telecommunications issue. Very similar charges were made at that time about the dangers of fall-out from masts.

Now I cannot cope with the correspondence I receive about mobile phones and broadband quality in parts of the country and so on. We have moved on to a new issue. We had a similar situation in the case of roads. People remember the extraordinary conflict there was about which route a road would take, through whose land it would run and what the compensation would be. That is the nature of things. We have also seen protests coming up to elections. Tensions are heightened and we have to deal with that matter. In a democracy there is always one election or another on the way.

I do not disagree much with Senator Thomas Byrne's summary of the position on the North-South interconnector. I agree with him and Senator Sean D. Barrett that the withdrawal of the planning application in 2010 and what caused that withdrawal did not reflect EirGrid's finest hour. I am concerned about this, but I am also concerned about the time we are losing. The cost of the part of the interconnector meshing the two systems, North and South, is approximately €25 million per annum. For those who have recently come to the debate on energy, the issue is quite complex. We now have an all-island market. We do not have an all-island market in gas, but we do have an all-island market in electricity and the delay in this project is problematic. It is a concern, particularly from the point of view of Northern Ireland.

Everyone who adverts to my decision to nominate John O'Connor as chairman of EirGrid starts off by saying he is a man of the highest integrity, whose probity and reputation cannot be challenged, but they then go on to say he is unsuitable for the job. We are immensely fortunate to have got a man who can bring to the matter the dimension of his experience in planning and the concerns of citizens with whom he dealt for 11 years in a quasi-judicial capacity as chairman of An Bord Pleanála. We are fortunate that this man is available to bring that dimension of knowledge and experience to the leadership of the EirGrid board. I reassure Senator David Norris with regard to the cordon sanitairethat ought to be around him for a couple of years, or that would be around him in other countries. Mr. O'Connor has been gone from the job for the past couple of years and I do not want to go further on that point.

I prepared a speech to deliver here, but I will not have the time to deliver it in the time allowed. I presume it will be available to Members on the website.