Noel Harrington (Cork South West, Fine Gael)
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I thank the Chairman for allowing me to attend. I am not a member of this committee. I am pleased to have listened to the testimony of the flood forum, particularly its members from west County Cork. I am familiar with the Skibbereen and Bandon issues. To proclaim an interest, I rent an office in Skibbereen. If history repeats itself, I will be in a dinghy at some stage.

What I take from our guests' testimony is the fact that there are great differences. For example, I have taken the opportunity to look at the works on the River Dodder in Ranelagh, particularly in proximity to the Aviva Stadium. Clearly, some of those engineering works will push the problem elsewhere. This issue must be addressed. One must trust that people know what they are doing, have recognised the problem, have identified a solution and will rectify the situation.

Representatives from west County Cork know about the Skibbereen and Bandon situations and the proposals on same. Engineering issues that arise in some small villages and towns in other areas will not be provided with an engineering solution in the short or medium term. Elsewhere, dwellings are built on flood plains. There may be no engineering solution to them. They will simply flood. Senator O'Donovan mentioned coastal flooding, which affected us recently. One can try to find an engineering solution to that problem.

Given our guests' comments, building an engineering solution can take a frustratingly long time, but the issue, and the one that I am interested in, is the protocol. Citizens have been affected, almost entirely through no fault of their own, and cannot return to their homes. A modest trust fund that they could easily and quickly access to return them to their homes would be a sensible approach to managing the problem.

Like a few others at this meeting, I was a member of Cork County Council, where I saw a number of Office of Public Works, OPW, flood risk assessment maps as part of a deliberation on local area plans. By and large, a person with local knowledge would agree with the maps' details. What is being proposed now is madness. The historical record shows that it does not make sense. That the insurance industry is using a desktop risk assessment or whatever it is called to exclude every resident in, for example, Ranelagh from accessing insurance after a flood incident is not an assessment of risk. Rather, it is a business decision that insurers have decided to take. The risk is to their profit and loss accounts.

I want the insurance industry to devise a decent risk assessment. From the presentations, I take it that some people will always be at high risk of flooding for whatever reason and that companies will not be able to provide insurance because they would need to pay out every five or ten years. However, this is not the information that we are getting on the ground from people who have never been flooded.

I do not want to make presumptions, as I am not a member of the committee, but I presume that it will issue a report or recommendations. I hope that a template for a protocol will be devised along the exact lines detailed by the presentations. I understand from the presentation that the insurers' rights need not be tapped. Comfort could be given in other ways to people who go to bed every night wondering whether they will wake up in dwellings that are flooded. It is an appalling prospect. With respect to the committee, I look forward to seeing recommendations that are in keeping with the presentation's narrow and achievable focus when describing the problems. I commend the guests in that regard.