North-South Interconnector
Seanad Éireann — 2026-09-29
============================================================

Sarah O'Reilly (AON), Agricultural Panel

The Minister of State said it was a necessary project. I do not think anybody disputes the importance of the infrastructure but it is about how it is delivered and how the landowners whose land it goes across are treated. Does the Minister of State accept that expert opinions differ? Doctors differ and patients die. There are expert opinions on both sides. Would the Minister of State agree it is unacceptable that farmers have to submit freedom of information, FOI, requests to find out where the access routes are on their land? That is not acceptable. I do not think any Minister could stand over that.
The organisation that represents the farmers and the people whose land this infrastructure goes over have not been sat down with or listened to. Nobody is listening to them. Everybody is talking to the councils, the councils talk to the Government, Ministers talk to EirGrid and EirGrid talks to ESB but nobody is speaking to the landowners this affects. The problem is the overgrounding. It can be undergrounded. Nobody is against the project. This is about how it is being delivered.

---

Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2026-09-29/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-10-05T01:00:59+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-09-29