Ciarán Lynch (Cork South Central, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State for coming to the House to take this issue. I ask him the status of the memorandum of understanding between the OPW and the insurance industry on ensuring that insurance is offered to households and businesses where flood remediation work has been carried out. This evening, people in Cork are bracing themselves for a flood that is expected to arrive at 8.30 p.m.

We have seen in Limerick that the trauma created for households and businesses is almost immeasurable. However, those businesses and households will face another trauma once they recover from the flooding because they will not be able to get insurance. They will have been geozoned, that is, the industry will have decided that it can no longer offer flood cover to their area. I do not suggest that areas of high risk should have normalised insurance but the current practice is that everybody is locked out from insurance cover once an area is geozoned. This has serious consequences for house values because the banks' engineers will not permit future purchasers to get mortgages on them. Businesses will be unable to trade into the future because they cannot get insurance on their stock.

When millions of euro are spent by the OPW and local authorities on remedial works, people should be able to change their geozoned status in order to get insurance. When is it expected that the memorandum of understanding will be put in place and what powers will it contain to ensure that insurance companies comply with it?

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