Seán Canney (Galway East, Independent) | Oireachtas source

There was a lot of interesting conversation going on there but as a former Minister with responsibility for the OPW dealing with flood relief, investing in it is one thing but to have a budget for the general maintenance of whatever we do is another issue. The fact is that the type of maintenance we do now is being hampered by our desire to protect the habitat in which the flood occurs. These are basic principles. I have learned that when you are talking about flood relief, you have to design and maintain channels so that the waters can flow. However, we now have a method of doing it which costs probably the same money, where we will take little bits of twigs out of a river and leave the problem there which is silt that has built up over the years. We cannot touch that now because of a fisheries issue or something else. We are compromising ourselves with all the rules and regulations we have. Sadly, it is costing us a lot of money to, effectively, not make a huge improvement in our flood defences because we are hampered all the time by environmental constraints we keep building into all of these projects.

We talk about preparing for the future, 2030. In 2017, I said that we need to do a drainage scheme for the Gort lowlands in my constituency. In 2024, we still have not got to a stage where we have what they call an exhibition stage of our project. We are going to spend at least ten years spending money on paperwork to try to justify whether this project will have a cost benefit for us at the end of the day. That is where the conflict really is in budgets. We have Departments that will not spend money unless they can see a cost benefit. The cost benefit is the here and now as opposed to what we would save into the future. We never build that into it.

We do not take the human cost into account. If people lost their homes, we do not take the additional stressful situations you have then, or livestock trapped in farmyards and that cannot get out or be fed. Over the past 20 years, we, in this country, have developed a great animal we are trying to feed. This animal is a bureaucratic way of trying to do things that we know we have to do but we have put ourselves in a position where we keep building barriers to getting the thing done at a cost. That is one thing.

When I look at transport in this country, we have to make a decision very fast. If we are going for the electric car as being the solution to our traffic and fossil fuels issue, we have to do a number of things. The first thing we need to do is invest in the infrastructure, so that people who buy a car will have the confidence they will be able to charge the car wherever they go in the same way as they can put fuel in at the moment. It is a big problem. It is not the witnesses' problem but if we are investing, we should be pre-planning and forward planning to put in that infrastructure so the guy or the family buying the electric car will get the nice experience of being able to use it rather than having a stressful issue about where to charge the car if travelling from Galway to Sligo and back again. That is the type of thing we come across.

On transport also, I am involved in a campaign to reopen our western rail corridor. It was mentioned by Deputy Conway-Walsh as well. That campaign has being going on for 20 years. Not all of them, but many of the global companies along the west coast and those that are exporting product want to have their product carbon neutral so they need to use rail freight, for instance. It will cost maybe €150 million to join the line up from Claremorris to Ennis and to create a corridor along the west coast to get us to Shannon Foynes Port, Galway Port, Dublin, Wexford or wherever. That has been talked about. It has now been decided that it could be a runner.

We talk about the electrification of our railway network, how much it will cost and how long it will take to do it. Then we have to couple that with the fact that as we reduce our consumption of fossil fuels, we are also reducing our tax take from excise duty and tax on that. What is going to replace that? They are the competing factors we have when we are trying to solve a problem which we are not so sure where it is going to level out at. If a flood defence is put in with an expectation that water levels are going to rise by so much over the next ten to 20 years but if the measurement is out, the flood defence will not be built to meet whatever the expectation is. The other risk is that all that money would not have needed to have been spent if water levels did not rise as much as we thought they would. There are many contradictory things in my mind. It will take something a little more than thinking about what to do.

To deal with the budget for climate action, we have to recoil it back and view it as a budget to prepare ourselves but also to bring ourselves back from the brink. There are two different things going on. I would like the witnesses' thoughts on that. What do they think of what I am saying or do they agree with me?