Beverley Flynn (Mayo, Fianna Fail)

I welcome the opportunity to contribute. I commend the role played by my local authority in County Mayo during the recent bad weather because it had a strong co-ordinated approach that started in December and carried right through the Christmas period. The local authority did an excellent job, certainly in maintaining the national road network. We have an extremely long secondary, regional and county road network in County Mayo. In fact, when I met with the council over the Christmas period it highlighted to me that in Ireland there are 24 km of road per 1,000 of population. Comparing that with other countries in Europe, in Italy, for example, there is 6 km of road per 1,000 of population. It is clear that people's expectations that every county, regional or local road would be gritted were unreasonable. That was never to be the case. Certainly, they were successful in County Mayo in keeping the national primary routes open. Most strategic roads in the county were kept open, as was, I am happy to say, Knock airport, one of the only airports in the country. It closed for a few hours, but apart from that it was business as usual. I commend the local authorities, the Civil Defence, the Garda Siochána, the Army and everyone who played a part. I was pleased with the local response. Also, the local authorities provided an emergency response number and throughout the Christmas period people could contact the local authority. For example, if transport was required for a hospital appointment, the Civil Defence were on hand to enable people to get to wherever they had to go, especially where some people were cut off.

However, I am critical of the national response. It seems it is only when the snow hits Dublin that there is a national emergency. There could be snow and ice in every other part of the country but there would be no national emergency, but the minute the taxis cannot get around the city of Dublin, everything requires a national response all of a sudden. I am critical of this because the issue did not begin on the first week in January; it started in the middle of December or on 18 December. It is important that the powers that be recognise that we live in this country and pay our taxes as does everyone else and we expect this to be recognised.

I refer to the supply of salt. Last year, my local county council used 2,500 tonnes of salt during the Christmas period. This year, it had to use 5,000 tonnes of salt but it had only 1,000 tonnes in storage. That is the full extent of its capacity to store salt. Even if the bad weather had been expected because of weather reports, it did not have the capacity to store more.

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