Sir, - Cllr Mary Freehill (February 13th) relates her experience of being passed around a "full circle", when she tried to find the community welfare officer responsible for a particular area of Dublin.
Over the past year I have been campaigning along with a group of concerned parents for the Government to adopt a precautionary approach to the siting of mobile phone masts near schools. Our letters have circumnavigated the Departments of Education, Health and Children, and Environment. None of these departments accepted responsibility for this issue and the correspondence circulated back and forth between us. Finally, we decided to deliver a petition at the Dail to the Minister for Public Enterprise, whose website claims she has responsibility for the development of communication technologies. The Minister informed us that our petition about the siting of masts was actually in the remit of the Department of the Environment. However, the Minster for the Environment responded that we should address our concerns to the Minister for Health and Children.
Sadly, having gone round a full circle of Irish Government departments, we reached a dead end, which means that my children and their school friends are now working and playing in the beam of greatest intensity from the mobile phone mast near their school. I hope that when the 1998 Human Rights Act is adopted in Ireland it will offer a straight line to European legislation which we can use to stop masts being erected close to our schools. - Yours, etc.,
Melanie Taylor, Monkstown, Co Dublin.