Jim Daly (Cork South West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome our guests, thank them for their time and ask that they pass on my gratitude to their colleagues on the ground in west Cork for the work they have done. They do a tremendous job.

I have a couple of questions in regard to the scheme in general. It is hard to explain to anybody how one feels when one's home has been flooded. To walk into a person's home and see his or her belongings and prized possessions, including photographs, etc., destroyed is a terrible experience. My constituency office was flooded between Christmas and the new year. I spent a couple of hours on new year's eve sweeping human faeces from my office floor. The odour that lingers in a property after it has been flooded is awful. To have one's home devastated in that way is awful, as I know only too well because the properties of my neighbours in Clonakilty were flooded in 2012. The fire brigade evacuated my wife and children from our house at 2.30 a.m. but it turned out not to be necessary as our house was not flooded. Unfortunately, as I said, all of our neighbours' houses were flooded. I called to those houses to see the damage done and the smell of them will remain with me forever.

To call a scheme a humanitarian assistance scheme and then subject applicants for that assistance to a means-test goes against the grain. That people whose lives and homes have been devastated will not, if earning more than €70,000, be eligible for assistance under this scheme is cruel and wrong. That provision must be reviewed. The aim of a humanitarian scheme is to assist people whose homes have been destroyed and who cannot access insurance. That people earning more than €70,000 cannot receive assistance is cruel.