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

Last week, in western Germany and eastern Belgium, they told us of the event that happened last July 12 months when 220 people lost their lives in an event the likes of which they had never seen previously. The opening salvo out of all of the commentary was that they had ever seen anything like that previously. In Bridgetown, County Wexford, last year, the first thing they said to me was that they had never seen anything like that previously. In Enniscorthy, they said that to me, as they did in Bandon and all over Ireland. The difference is the intensity of rainfall and the damage that it is doing in catchments where the land is already sodden, and where one has a tidal issue as well, it can be catastrophic. The figures in Liège, Belgium, are terrifying: 40 people dead; 385,000 tonnes of waste; 50,000 people impacted; 100,000 houses; and 11,000 cars washed away. These are numbers that are out of a telephone book but they will give the committee an indication of the scale of the problem in not too dissimilar a population base to some of our population bases, for example, in Deputy Mairéad Farrell's constituency, Galway city, in Cork city, and in my own local area, Limerick city. These are big urban population bases, in many cases built below sea level, and if they are not protected we will undoubtedly see a catastrophic event, hopefully, not in that scale. The problem is we are racing against the clock in many cases. The explanation behind, for instance, much of our capital underspend, which is why I am here today, is as a direct result of the fact that our planning process does not reflect the needs of the community which we are now trying to address. This is a problem all over the country. It is in the Chairman's constituency and it is in the Deputy's constituency. I can list off the names of the towns and villages that are bogged down going nowhere. We have to change tack. We will have to start looking at different forms of remedies and solutions and we are open to all of those.