Mr. Peter Power:

I do not know if I have captured the attention of my fellow Limerick man, Deputy Dan Neville. Deputy Neville and Deputy Durkan raised the broadly similar issues of the delay and the co-ordination. If the Deputies do not mind, I will deal with both issues together. We had about four days, approximately 72 hours, advance warning from the weather forecasters that this would be a very big storm. Due to the developing weather system it was not possible to pre-position aid into the area of the disaster. That was not an option. I can only speak for UNICEF. The storms hit at 4.30 a.m. on Friday. On Thursday evening our global depot in Copenhagen had already mobilised our material for shipping and we knew it would be a big storm. We had already got our material out of the warehouse on aircraft and that was in there by Sunday, about 48 hours after the disaster. I mention that as I think it was a pretty good response. By their nature, each crisis, whether a tsunami, earthquake, or super typhoon of this nature, is very different.

To try to have a plan for each and every possibility is impossible because, by their nature, these are natural events and it is very hard to predict them. That is not to say for one moment that proper organisation or using the best technology should not occur. Despite the best will in the world, there were huge amounts of aid sitting on the tarmac in Manila airport, which I saw, and in Tacloban airport and getting it from the airport one mile or two miles down the road took hours because everything was blocked.