Patrick O'Donovan (Limerick County, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The Deputy is correct when he says that nature-based solutions will have to play a role. No matter how hard we try, we cannot keep back the sea or every river everywhere. Rivers will break their banks and flood and we will not be able to keep back everything everywhere. When I met the Deputy, we spoke about OPW mapping to local authorities as part of the development of local area plans and county development plans. It will be critical. I met the environmental pillar as part of my bilateral engagement recently. Upstream catchments are important in the OPW's development of flood relief schemes if we are to ensure we capture and have full knowledge of where the water is coming from. They will have to play a major part in the future design of our flood mitigation measures, and people will expect that. In terms of how the Department will be measured on climate change over the coming years, I have insisted in our strategy that our flood relief schemes must involve a combination of measures. Hard concrete alone is not something that people will accept anymore.

There will have to be a combination of measures, and soft engineering as much as hard engineering is something I would expect to see into the future in terms of design.

We spoke about the Arklow issue briefly on a tele-call the day we met. It is fully designed and has, as members will know, gone to An Bord Pleanála, but there is nothing to stop people from putting in submissions. Submissions will probably be submitted by councillors. I am not pre-empting what An Bord Pleanála decides, but if it were to come back and say as part of its final deliberation that a submission from a public representative was worthwhile and further vistas were to be improved, that is something that the Office of Public Works would take on board with Wicklow County Council.

The Office of Public Works, by the way, is never above criticism. Public consultation, public engagement, An Bord Pleanála hearings and local authority engagement always improve a flood relief scheme and the final package, and that has been very evident in any of the flood relief schemes that have been built. The OPW would be the first to say public consultation has always delivered a good final output. Therefore, it might be helpful if the Deputy or some of the local authority members made an oral submission. That might circumvent it because, at the moment, we cannot make a change because the project has gone into the planning process, but if An Bord Pleanála made the decision, that would be something.

On Bray and silting and things like that, there is an ongoing relationship between OPW and local authorities. This is something the OPW will have to formalise as we work out CFRAMs - a more structured and formalised relationship. We spoke about it at the meeting I held with the city and county managers. Memorandums of understanding and service level agreements will have to be put in place between us and the local authorities as we formally hand over flood relief schemes. We pay for management and maintenance but the councils inspect the work. I will supply the Deputy with a written reply specifically on the Bray project.

On the overall contextualised work, we will need a memorandum of understanding between ourselves and the County and City Management Association because the workload will become too big for us to be doing on an ad hoc, one-by-one basis. We will require proper service level agreements and memorandums of understanding between ourselves and the association.