Seán Canney (Galway East, Independent) | Oireachtas source

The emergency plan, which is a response to the flooding emergencies of winter 2015-16, is being led by the Department of Defence in conjunction with the local authority, the OPW, the Civil Defence, the Irish Red Cross, etc. This group will meet on 9 November to review what happened last year and to prepare for the coming winter. It is important that we ensure we have enough sandbags available, just as we make sure we have enough salt to deal with severe frost. People need to know what the relevant phone numbers are and who they are supposed to telephone. Having travelled to various counties, I want to record my appreciation of the huge effort that was made and the resilience that was shown by everybody involved in the local authorities, the OPW, the voluntary agencies and the local communities. It is important not only to acknowledge that but also to say to people that we will not forget about them when the emergency is over until we see the flood happening again.

When we talk about what is happening with flooding globally, it is important to emphasise the need to get up to speed with regard to early weather warning systems. We have agreed an implementation plan for the introduction of an early weather warning system. This would give us time to prepare for the winter. The implementation plan has been agreed and we are working to train people. I hope we will be modelling some of the technologies by this time next year. It usually takes approximately ten years for one of these systems to be completely validated. Our plan is to have it up and running in five years. I remind those who ask why we cannot turn on a button and have this up and running that we have to build the technology for here. We have looked at international best practice in doing this. In all countries, it has taken up to ten years to produce a system. We are planning to produce our system in five years. The meteorological service is working on that at the moment.

It is important to have an emergency response and we need to be prepared for an emergency. We do not know what volume of water will fall from the sky on a given day or in a week. We get flash floods. We get continuous rain in isolated areas. It is not uncommon that all of a sudden there is flash flooding on a road on in a town, which never happened before. Yesterday was a beautiful day in Dublin but in my neck of the woods in east Galway it rained all day. We have that variation in a very small country.