Dr. Ted McCormack:

As outlined to the committee in November, Geological Survey Ireland, GSI, is a division of the Department of Communications, Climate Action and Environment and is Ireland’s national geoscience organisation. GSI carries out its role as a key knowledge centre and data repository with a library, archives and extensive digital data holdings. It provides an extensive advisory service, particularly to local authorities, and has statutory roles as a national archive and consultee on planning in areas such as county development plans, wind farm development and foreshore licences. In addition to supporting Government and local authorities, GSI provides data and advice to industry and research and acts as a project partner to all aspects of Irish geoscience, especially in European projects.

GSI has developed expertise in the area of groundwater flooding, especially in understanding complex karst systems, including turloughs, as they can be important pathways for pollution. The 2016 Programme for a Partnership Government, under the area of climate change and flooding, contained the following objective: "[in relation to] Turlough Systems: We will provide resources to the OPW to commission studies into individual problematic (prone to flooding) Turlough systems, if requested by a local authority or another relevant State agency." GSI has been tasked with gathering historic and new information to deliver on this objective and initiated a new dedicated groundwater flooding project in collaboration with researchers at Trinity College Dublin and the Institute of Technology Carlow. The core objectives of the project are to establish a permanent monitoring network to provide long-term quantitative flood data as well as producing national historic and predictive groundwater flood maps.

Since the previous Oireachtas joint committee meeting, the GSI groundwater flooding programme has been focused on producing a national groundwater flood map while also installing and maintaining monitoring equipment at groundwater flood sites. A national maximum historic groundwater flood map was produced and supplied to the OPW in April this year. Work on a predictive flood map is ongoing and the map will be supplied to the OPW later this summer. The predictive map will present not just the likely extent of groundwater flooding, but also the probability of a given flood occurring at applicable sites. These maps will assist the OPW in fulfilling its obligations as required under the second implementation cycle of the EU floods directive. In addition, Geological Survey Ireland also recently had discussions with Met Éireann regarding potential groundwater flood forecasting capabilities.

In respect of Ballycar, Geological Survey Ireland has been taking part in the technical subcommittee meetings regarding the flooding in the area. Monitoring stations have been installed at Ballycar and Lough Gash turloughs. The stations record water level data at hourly intervals which are freely available upon request. In addition to these monitoring stations, Ballycar and other flood prone areas along the western railway corridor are being monitored using Copernicus satellite imagery.