ESB should utilise farmers to manage overhanging trees and hedges

THE leader of a major farm organisation has proposed that the basic maintenance of hedgerows and trees overhanging power and communications cabling should be ‘contracted out’ to trained local farmers.

ICMSA president Denis Drennan said that the damage wrought by Storm Éowyn must signal the end of what he called 'the delusion' that the ESB and other operators were able to maintain to an acceptable basic degree the vast networks of poles and overhead wires running across the country and through farmers’ fields.

“We have had a reality check and that means accepting the need to change the system around power line management that Storm Éowyn so completely exposed as no longer feasible or effective,” said Mr. Drennan. This, he said, was not a reflection on the competence of the ESB or other service providers, but rather a factual observation that so vast and disparate a system - extending into every boreen in the State - could not be maintained centrally in the face of more frequent and more intense storms.

Mr. Drennan said it was perfectly obvious that there had been many instances where the ESB poles themselves were no longer sufficiently robust and had become brittle, and allied to that was the issue of ash dieback that had thousands of diseased roadside ash trees unable to withstand even sub-storm winds and collapsing en masse across the wiring carrying power and communications to rural communities.

Mr. Drennan said it was time to think about supporting landowners to maintain hedgerows under powerlines to a defined standard.

Local farmers were obviously the best positioned to monitor the threat presented by such trees it was worth the ESB and government looking at ways whereby interested farmers, after appropriate training, could monitor and carry out the basic maintenance of hedgerows under power lines.

Farmers, he said, already carry out hedgerow maintenance within their farms on an annual basis and monitoring and maintaining hedgerows under powerlines would be a simple extension of this practice.

He commented: “We have to accept that the kind of intensity and frequency of these storms signals a change - and we have to change our preparation and response accordingly.

“ICMSA thinks that there’s a really compelling and practical case for the ESB to enter agreements with willing local farmers to look after and maintain the hedgerows as well as monitoring the condition of poles.

“Any removal of large trees, etc., would have to be carried out by trained personnel subject to the agreement of the landowner. But I think that the farmers themselves would be interested and we just have to accept that the days of expecting the ESB to know about every pole from Malin to Mizen and every boreen in between is just delusional and is going to get us into the kinds of situations that we see today where farm communities and rural towns are without power for nearly a fortnight.”