Mr. John Hegarty:

We are here to represent a growing number of people in Cork. We started out as a group of professional people to look at this issue. We attended the consultation of the OPW. Looking at the figures, we found that 44 people attended their consultation process in July 2013, with only 181 attending in 2014 and 186 in 2017. Therefore, we found that no one in Cork really knew about this proposal. It was not advertised widely and an effort was not made to inform people in order that they would know about it and could comment on it at the early stages. We are a group of architects, engineers, hydrologists and historians and many people from UCC and around the world have supported us with knowledge and calculations.

The more we looked into the scheme, the more impact we found it to have and the more the specialists who were advising us said that this is not right, that it is old-fashioned technology and an old-fashioned approach. It is an approach that would not be carried out in the Netherlands because long miles of defences are not the right way to carry out flood relief. A shorter flood relief solution should be chosen. We were told that things were dangerous, and we started with the impact on heritage. The heritage impact got people of Cork in their hearts. We have 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th century walls in the city centre. Up to a few weeks ago, Viking remains were being found in the city centre. We started to look at the widespread loss of that authentic fabric in the city centre. Businesses in the city centre are worried about having something similar to the Luas works that could run over ten years in the centre of Cork. That is alarming to everybody. It also was alarming that one could not alter the walls in respect of possible sea level rise.

A lot of money is being spent on a solution that is not manageable into the future. Insurance companies do not like demountable flood barriers. People want insurance in Cork. The proposal for demountables to protect heritage is a management nightmare for the city to have to implement into the future.