Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I represent Kildare North, where there has been extensive flooding in places such as Celbridge, Leixlip, Maynooth, Johnston, Kill, Straffan and Sallins. These locations featured in news items over the past ten or 12 years. There was footage of an individual in a rowing boat in a housing estate in the town of Celbridge. This is crazy stuff. The local authority and OPW response can be good and bad. I find that bigger the area affected, the quicker the response from the OPW because the cost-benefit analysis will prioritise such an area.

Even where there are very expensive and satisfactory mitigation measures, problems still arise with insurance companies. In the past couple of weeks, a resident contacted me about the lack of insurance cover for a housing estate on a hillside that never flooded. Some 200 houses were refused insurance cover because they are within 500 m of the canal. The residents always had insurance cover in the past. There is no history of flooding.

I was contacted by an individual from another estate who is also having difficulties. Although he had been paying a relatively small sum of €280 or €300, he received a quote of €1,000, which is prohibitive because he is on a low income. These are but two examples. There is no history of flooding in either of the areas in question but, because there has been some flooding in the town, the insurance companies are adopting the aforementioned positions. The town is built on two hills so there are areas that are more prone to flooding than others.

There is no doubt that what the delegates are saying about geocoding, as articulated by the current Chairman and previous Chairman, is correct. It appears there is a cartel in operation because is not coincidental that people from different locations are telling us the same things independently of each other.

One of the key issues is that when mitigation work is done there must be some formal certification, whether done privately or by the OPW, which will be sufficient for the insurance companies to accept that the risk is no longer there. If the witnesses have ideas in terms of protocols, it would be useful if they would forward them to us because detail is really important for working out solutions. Details on why insurance companies refuse cover, for example, would be very useful to have. We need to find a way of capturing such data. Insurance companies themselves should be capturing that data and telling us why they are refusing to provide cover for householders. Armed with such data, we can then address the issues with the industry.

I have seen some really good work done by the OPW, but on the Liffey they started at the top and worked their way down when they should have started at the bottom and worked their way up. The approach they took meant that they would inevitably produce a flood further downstream. That is the kind of thing that we can justifiably criticise.

There is no doubt that this committee acknowledges the extent of this problem. We are very concerned that we need to deal with this issue but we need to construct a slate of measures that we can bring to the Minister for the Environment, Community and Local Government, Deputy Hogan or the Minister of State at the Department of Finance, with responsibility for the OPW, Deputy Hayes. We must deal with this because householders at risk of not being able to get insurance against flooding and not being able to sell their homes is a very serious issue. It would be useful to hear specific ideas on the kinds of protocols that might work or on systems in other countries that might work here. Obviously we will do some research ourselves but specific examples of what the witnesses would like us to do would be very helpful.