Patrick O'Donovan (Limerick County, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Give me a chance to finish. That does not mean that we are adverse to finding a solution that involves the M4. However, we do not own that land. We have to have respect for the people who own the land adjacent to us. It also does not mean that we discontinue any sort of dialogue with our neighbours. We are not going to do that either. It is in our interest to restore the lands in their entirety. That is our objective and it is a stated objective of the State.

In respect of what the Deputy said about the other aspect of the Department's role, as I said earlier, what is covered under the Arterial Drainage Act protects around 650,000 acres and 77,000 homes. Some people in this House would like to dismantle the Act, ask whether it is fit for purpose anymore and seek to get rid of it. Everybody to their own devices. Every one of the Deputies in this meeting at the moment is from a rural constituency, where the network of housing available to all of us is predominantly one-off rural housing. The reality for most one-off rural houses in certain parts of the country, including the south, the south east and the east in particular, is that they are protected by the OPW through regular annualised maintenance programmes that are delivered under the Arterial Drainage Act. We know that if that is discontinued, and there are many people in the Houses that want it discontinued, it will have massive unintended consequences.

The Deputy is absolutely right that one person's rewetting is another person's flooding. I have serious concerns about the drive to rewet certain parts of the country without any regard to the neighbours or the people who have lived there for generations. the Deputy referenced a turlough. One of the saddest cases at the moment is in County Roscommon, where people are facing a horrific situation. Roscommon County Council has done as much as it can do. It applied for a scheme through which we funded in excess of €2 million to decant water from a lake to the River Shannon. An interest group took Roscommon County Council to court. Work has stopped and we have had to seal the pipe at both ends. Now those people are terrified of when the water is going to over tap works that have been done by Roscommon County Council to raise roads, and come into their homes. This is reality of what we have to deal with every day of the week. It does not mean that we discontinue, cut them off, drop them and say we have forgotten about them. Indeed, as late as last week we had another internal meeting in the Department with regard to this. There are many of them. There are Lough Funshinaghs all over the country where a viable engineered solution are required at the moment for flood risk. Unfortunately, we have to jump through hoops from an environmental standard point of view to protect people's lives and their properties where that might not have been the case 20 years ago.

In relation to the Deputy's own county, there are 990-odd houses that are covered by the schemes there. The largest is in Naas, where over half of the properties are, but some very significant ones are already completed, like the first two parts of the Morell project and the one in Leixlip as well. We have an ambitious programme there with an investment of close to €22 million that we will deliver in County Kildare.