Cathal Crowe (Clare, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I was following some of this in my office. I am not a member of the committee but I would like to contribute. First, I thank the Minister of State and his staff for their work in Cloonlara. The Minister of State has been down there several times with the Oireachtas representatives and local residents. It is a success and we thank them for that. The water levels were getting quite high in the last five or six weeks but lo and behold the embankment and sluice gates did their job. I just wanted to put on record our immense gratitude to the Minister of State, his officials and most important, those who were on the ground with machinery for well over a year putting all of that place. It is very much appreciated.

I just wanted to speak very briefly about the drainage Act. I have raised a number of parliamentary questions in this regard. The Arterial Drainage Act dates back to the year 1945 and it split the function of managing Ireland's water courses and the drainage of them between local authorities and the Office of Public Works, or the Board of Works at the time. The officials will say they have a finite budget but county councils are definitely not resourced. When they prepare their annual budget every December there is only a small sliver of funding set aside for drainage. The River Inagh in County Clare is one of those managed by the council. I do not know how it happened. In 1945, which predates all of us being around or being in politics - I am not going to guess anyone's age here - somebody decided that the River Inagh was for Clare County Council to maintain. That is grand but the reality is that year on year, Clare County Council has a budget of €80,000 for arterial drainage maintenance. It is minuscule. It does not get next or near to it. After all those decades of a lack of maintenance, we now have a channel that totally floods. It spills out onto neighbouring farms and roads. I cannot expect the Minister of State to have all the minute details of every river or turn in a river in the country but there needs to be some flexibility so rivers like that, or sections of them, can be transferred from local authorities to the Office of Public Works to ensure they actually get dealt with. It is simply never going to get dealt with by Clare County Council. There are probably 100 other examples in the country. There needs to be a way for rivers that have been designated one way to be reassigned and vice versa, or segments of them at least.

The Minister of State visited a site in County Clare about 18 months ago. Again, his presence was very much appreciated on the day. I am talking about Clare Abbey, which is a beautiful abbey. The Office of Public Works had undertaken a lot of work along the riverbank and the Minister of State came in to visit the historic structures there. Essentially, the abbey is being vandalised quite a lot. Plenty of drug paraphernalia can be seen there following weekends and a number of beautiful gravestones have been smashed to pieces. The ask, very simply, was that CCTV cameras be installed. I know it is a sensitive site. It is a protected site and very little can happen there without authorisation. Away from politics, I farm with my family down home. Since January we have put up a number of CCTV cameras without any wiring systems. They have a simple sim card and I am able to follow, hour by hour, what is happening in certain fields, gaps, entrances to sheds etc. There has to be a way to put up a few cameras to be able to monitor this in-house without compromising the beauty and integrity of this old building. We do not expect someone to be sitting in front of the screen all day long watching what is happening in Clare Abbey but at the very least when an event or incident happens there would be a cache of evidence there that the Minister of State's officials could pass over to the Garda. I ask that the Minister of State move on that. I again thank him for what he is doing. He is making inroads in his Department and it is appreciated.