Seán Canney (Galway East, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank the witnesses for attending. If I close my eyes and go back to 2004, when Mr. Silke came into the county council office in Galway, the problems that exist now existed then. I might speak a little to the experience I had, when I was Minister of State with responsibility for the Office of Public Works, in trying to get works done on the Shannon. We got machinery in but it was put in only to cut overhanging trees along the edges and it took me about nine months to succeed in getting that done. I recall going to Portumna and looking at the machines going out on the floating pontoons to go out to do it. It was a big dawning. That is all that was ever done on it.

The pinch points on the Shannon are still there and will remain there for ever. Mr. Silke talked about the habitats directive, but there is now also another animal to deal with, namely, the climate action legislation that is in place, which is compounding the issue. We have created something we are not able to handle. If we take what the ESB did by holding back the water, what has been created now is that areas of importance, with muck on the river, cannot be touched such that we cannot get the water to flow. When we talk about the general draining of rivers or whatever, what is being used to drain them is not buckets but prongs, and they can bring out only so much of the weeds. It is wrong that the National Parks and Wildlife Service is standing on the riverbank as the OPW is doing it and it will stop the OPW if it is using the wrong machinery. We have a perfect storm.

Moreover, Waterways Ireland wants to keep the water level high for boating for the summer. The ESB in 2017 was generating 2% of the national input into our grid but it could be less than that now. We have gone beyond the stage where we need a single authority. What we need is one person to tell someone in the ESB to do one job and someone else in Waterways Ireland to do another. They should be left with the jobs they are doing, but there needs to be someone to direct them. We should not be reinventing the wheel but telling people what to do and when, in a way that looks at the Shannon and how it performs and also at how the people around it are affected.

I am not a member of this committee but I came here to offer my support. I tried to put in a single authority and we put together a task force to try to build something into that. We met three or four times and some progress was made, but we never got to a stage where we were going to produce legislation. For me as a Minister of State to meet the ESB, it was like trying to meet the man above, not even the Pope, because the ESB had its own agenda and it had to go through so many channels before I could sit down and ask what the hell was going on. We have created a monster in this country and we have added another animal to its back that is not nice, namely, climate action. It is very difficult to do anything at the moment in this country. MEPs will be debating the land restoration legislation in the European Parliament and so on, and that will happen, but what often happens is that when we transpose legislation from Europe into Irish law, we do it twice as hard on ourselves as we should. We give ourselves no wriggle room to try to protect the habitat we have and the biodiversity we had, which we have lost.

I look at the Gort lowlands, where we are trying to start a scheme to create some flood relief. I initiated it in 2016, but we are coming into 2024 and we are still not at a stage where we can exhibit what we are doing. My friend Senator Lombard was talking about Cork. I put on an exhibition of all the plans for Cork city in 2017, but we will be in 2024 shortly and we have not done anything. Highly educated people have objected and challenged everything along the way, so we end up with nothing and we end up with stagnation. That is what we have in the callows, because we do not really and truly have someone who will take control of it. I challenged the ESB about all the peat it had dumped into the Shannon, and that was received with indignation, whereby they asked me how dare I say that. That happened a long time ago but the peat is in the river and has remained there. I read something about how we could solve flooding in Ireland and it was that we have to let the rivers flow. We have created a mess where not only do we not have the flow but we are encouraging the rivers to be blocked by not cleaning them. In the 1960s, the Corrib drainage scheme did work on a lot of channels around my area and I recall it being done. Unfortunately, we did not do any maintenance on it until about seven years ago. That investment we made has gone to pot because we never managed it. It is a huge problem.

Going back to the fodder scheme and what it should or should not be, that is a different issue. Compensation is good and welcome but a week ago, there was no compensation, and all of a sudden there was a U-turn and now there is. It is half-baked, if even that, and that is my concern. Leaving that aside, compensation will not solve the problem we have. I agree with Deputy Fitzmaurice that we need ministerial action to go to the EU and get derogation to solve a problem we have because it is very specific to us in Ireland, namely, the loss of our biodiversity and habitats as a result of the habitats directive and how we can turn that back.

That is it. That is the way we deal with it. Deputy Nolan was wondering how we should do it. That is what we have to do and, as a committee member, I will support it in any way we can to try to push the Ministers to do that. I refer to the Minister of the Environment, Climate and Communications and the other Ministers who have to do it. It is like the Shannon itself. We need to have somebody who will take charge of this, going to Europe and bringing everybody else with them rather than different people going out and all coming back with different stories. However, we need action and we need it now. This causes mental stress, no more than in Gort in south Galway, in Cork, or in Louth where it is beginning to manifest itself with high risk every winter. The witnesses have it every summer and winter. These things are coming at them and they are wondering when this will change or begin to turn. We are going back to the two "fs", namely, to be free from floods and free to farm. They are very simple things. You may not be free from floods all the time but I refer to instances caused by a decision made by humans, such as water levels not being lowered in time, or what has happened by raising levels in rivers in that we do not have the storage capacity in them, which have not been rectified. These are man-made decisions that are preventing the witnesses from farming so we need to get them out of the way as well. There is a lot of work and I am sorry to say that since 2016 or 2017 when I was Minister of State, I do not think this has moved one inch. Due to the additional climate incidences we have had, it has probably regressed.