Mobile menace creeps into the wilderness

TULLY Mountain, across the bay from me in Connemara, is not one of Connaught's great summits. But at a thousand feet or so it was enough to make an adventure for Conor Grennan, aged 12, and a fine, affecting poem, Two Climbing, for his father, Eamon.

The concrete plinth is a triangulation point, a map-maker's cairn, and does little to diminish the hill or tame its spirit. Tim Robinson might disagree with that. "A mountain top," he writes in one of his essays, "is one of the most sensitive spots on earth, of our feelings for the earth in all their depth, elevation and comprehensiveness. A concrete stub demeans it, in a way that the traditional hilltop cairn does not, that stone memory-bank of all the people who have clambered up to that height."

That's as may be. Some of the people who clamber up now arc just as likely to sit on the cairn and make a call with their pocket phone: "Guess where I am!"

Looking out, I try to imagine Tully with a 100-foot steel-lattice telephony tower welded to its shoulder. Not, I hasten to add, that any such outrage is planned by Telecom or Esat Digiphone (the nearest tower in prospect is at Letterfrack village, on the doorstep of the Connemara National Park). But similar, if more anonymous, hills all over Ireland have now been picked out to fit the honeycomb grid of radio "cells" devised by the corporate computers

My family doctor rather urgently needs a mobile phone - or she does now that such a thing exists. But since her daily round winds in and out of the mountains and foothills of south Mayo, she would need to stand at the end of Roonagh Quay to be sure of getting her calls. A local mast is needed, and the planning application for it is one of more than 20 lodged with Mayo County Council from Telecom alone: Esat have yet to put theirs in.

If only, my GP suggests (not too seriously) they could secrete the antennae in the steeple of the church on top of the Reek. After all, in America they hide them in clock towers at shopping centres, or even in artificial trees. But the chapel on Croagh Patrick not only lacks a steeple, it is far too high for that purpose: the companies don't want their equipment rattling about in storms or icing up in winter. And they need to service it without a pilgrim's penance or a helicopter bill.

So the really lofty peaks are individually safe enough. At hazard are the characterful upland horizons that conserve our illusion of wilderness. We have escaped the moorland radar dishes and stark radio arrays of our militarised neighbours. Even our more intimate local hills, just outside town, have mostly an innocent, pastoral profile. The new towers, stakes through the heart of the landscape, have a presence that compromises silence and space and thus the special personality of the Irish countryside.

Certain parameters determine both their number and the degree of their ugliness. First, because a pocket phone can't be too powerful, each mast is designed to cover a 10-mile radius. It can't actually be a slim mast, with wire stays, but rather a triangular tower, too substantially rigid to sway or twist. The radio dishes which link one mast to another must be held in perfect alignment whatever the wind

The clutter at the head of the mast is also fairly irreducible, since it needs two antennae, about 12 feet apart, to pick up the weak signal from the mobile phone, and another to broadcast back. If the two companies agree to share a mast, it becomes even higher and bulkier, to provide two platforms.

Up to 1994, Telecom needed no planning permission, and the brutal telephony towers which arose at the heart of the western country towns such as Castlebar and Ballinrobe were an ominous precedent. When the new Act began to loom, the company bought rural sites in all directions, putting in a concrete base or fencing off the little plots to show they had "started construction".

Most planning applications now are for 30-metre masts - an arbitrary height, often unrelated to the elevation of the site and proposed strength and coverage of the signal. Not every planning official has the technical confidence to press the merits of an alternative site, or to beat the mast down to a perfectly adequate 20 metres.

The planners are helped more by the spirit than the letter of the Minister's new guidelines. On the one hand, the "visual intrusion" of the masts is clearly recognised, and "great care will have to be taken when dealing with fragile or sensitive landscapes". On the other, any stubborn move "to rule out every hilltop" is viewed as impracticable: whether from shared or clustered masts, the signals must radiate from somebody's skyline.

A favoured solution is to stick the masts in forestry plantations, in the hope of "losing" their alien, fastigate forms. But most hills and ridges do not, thank goodness, have conifers growing on them.

The planning guidelines do appreciate, in an almost ominous way, what an access road can do to a wild, bare landscape. Even beyond its visual impact, the road may further open up an otherwise undisturbed area to unwanted visitors". It must be absolutely necessary, say the guidelines, and "grubbed up again at the end of construction. Exceptionally, the company could be made to use a helicopter to construct and install the tower.

These decisions on the masts are among the toughest on the local planners' desks this autumn and, no national guidelines can help them very much. "Softening the visual impact can be achieved through judicious choice of colour scheme and through the planting of shrubs, trees etc as a screen or backdrop." With a tower that's 20 or 30 metres high, they have to be kidding.

I LEAVE to others the vexed question of electromagnetic fields and pulsed microwaves and the masts' capacity to scramble our synapses or worse. They are licensed for a certain strength of signal, but who is to inspect it in the field? Planners will make monitoring conditions, if they are wise. And for many people, the visual offence of the masts will still be compounded by a dark radius of fear.