Noel Dempsey (Meath West, Fianna Fail)

I acknowledge what the Deputy said in respect of front-line staff. I do not agree with him that the response to the severe weather in December was not much improved on what happened last January. As stated earlier, there were only 10,000 tonnes of salt in the country in January of last year. In December, supplies of some 50,000 tonnes were on hand. Those supplies were managed much better on this occasion than was the case last January. Salt was mixed with grit in certain circumstances because such a mixture is more effective for dealing with snow than is the case with regard to ice or black ice. The additional equipment that was provided, the storage facilities for salt that have been made available and other matters to which I referred earlier also represent improvements. That said, I agree with the Deputy that nothing is perfect and that one will not always get everything right. New issues emerged on this occasion, principally the fact that it happened over 27 days, which was a long cold spell. However, I believe it was catered for much more effectively and efficiently than previously.

While we can of course make improvements, if the Deputy is suggesting, as I am sure he is not, that we can magically reach some situation where the 90,000 km of roadway in the country will be kept open during severe weather, that is just not possible. The main target was to ensure that the roads that carry 60% of the ordinary traffic and 80% of the commercial traffic were kept open. That was the priority and any aim below that was to assist locally to try to reach hospitals, factories, schools and so on, which the local authorities made a reasonable effort to do. Nonetheless, I take the point made by Deputy that in general we should learn from each of these events, try to improve as they happen and try to plan for them. A fair summary of what happened on this occasion is that we achieve that.

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