Mr. Lawrence Owens:

The river divides and creates this island within the centre of the city. The vast majority of our members on that island do not have flood insurance. Some may have had their last flood insurance before the last episode but that get-out-of-jail card is gone and they are now without insurance cover. I will give an example of one trader who was flooded in 2014. She had flood insurance and the premises was devastated. A €250,000 investment was put into the premises. It was built in with huge resilience in the premises in terms of what can be done. There are certain mechanisms that can be applied at a business level to make a premises somewhat robust in terms of flood prevention and flood defences. However, with regard to her insurance going forward, she has a €20,000 excess only. That is not an excess on the bottom down. That is the most she can ever get if her business is flooded again and, therefore, traders either have no flood insurance or it is so negligible that it is not worth it.

The economy is on an upturn and businesses are starting to reopen. Flood insurance is a basic requirement for loan approval from a bank. If one does not have it, the loan is gone.

Local and multinational investment will continue to be affected because whereas flood insurance is a given in most locations, unfortunately in Cork, particularly on the island, businesses do not have it. It is extremely difficult to run a business in the knowledge that flooding, which is inevitable unless defences are installed in the coming years, will probably wipe out one's business. It is very difficult to trade in this type of environment. Statistics show that €500 million has been spent nationally on flood defences and it is forecast that a further €210 million will be spent for this purpose. Our concern, as I intimated, is that the large sums spent by taxpayers on flood defences surely deserve some degree of recognition. The defences established by the Office of Public Works in Cork function and are sufficiently resilient to provide some level of defence. The insurance industry should re-examine its position. While I agree with Dr. Surminski that there is no silver bullet that will resolve this issue, the problem will get worse if we ignore it.