Brian Stanley (Laois-Offaly, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I hope that the Ministers are taking my point on board. This is a serious matter for both of them. Agricultural land is also being flooded. However, homes must be the first priority. Will the Minister for the Environment, Community and Local Government examine the allocations to drainage boards - the Barrow Drainage Board has done great work in recent years - to determine whether they need extra funding to prevent flooding in towns such as Mountmellick and Portarlington?

Regarding flood mapping, something must be done for people who cannot get insurance. They are caught between a rock and a hard place. Measures must be put in place while they wait for flood defences to be prepared. The Government should meet the insurance industry to determine what can be done. Some areas have been mapped as being at risk of flooding, but they are not. They only contain specific zones that are at risk.

I ask the Minister and his officials to meet representatives of the insurance industry on that.

A significant amount of money has been brought in by the property tax and the motor tax this year. The Government has hived off €600 million of that to pay off debts, as well as €490 million for Uisce Éireann. We went through that in detail yesterday. The promise made to the public was that such money would be available for local projects, and that has never been more important than now, in order to cope with flooding damage in our towns. What has happened has made a nonsense of the local property tax. The raiding of that fund, along with the reduction in outdoor staff in the local authorities has left them ill equipped to cope with the problems they are facing. This policy has been shortsighted, and I know that when an area is flooded, repairing the damage will cost a lot more than a bit of prevention. The fact the OPW has spent €350 million in capital works in recent years is to be welcomed. Some good work has been done and many counties, in which nothing had been done for years, have had some of their problems solved by those works.

In light of what has happened this year, it is important that an up-to-date risk assessment be conducted. I know the Minister is seeking information from the local authorities, but it is important that a comprehensive risk assessment is carried out following recent storms and floods in areas that have not been flooded before. These are new problems. We cannot delude ourselves that this is just a once-off consequence of severe weather. This is happening more frequently. Severe weather events in recent years have highlighted the consequences of climate change, and the need to address this at global, national and local levels. Extreme weather events are taking place every few months. While we have been relatively fortunate in this country, we have seen massive devastation across the globe. We cannot be confident that the weather patterns of the last ten years will not continue.

Mr. Gabriel D'Arcy of Bord na Móna announced today that the company's data has shown that in each of the past six years, we have experienced weather patterns that would normally occur only once every 50 years. That is very worrying when we consider what is likely to come. People have had direct experience of the impact of the severe weather, and it has been proven that these are not freak one-off events. Climate change is happening. We in this State need to make the case due to our position in the Atlantic. The Gulf Stream is being pushed further south by warm air from the Arctic due to global warming. While we in this State have signed up to EU commitments on CO2 emissions, where is the climate change Bill? The Minister might tell us that today. I have not seen it. Last year, the environment committee did a lot of work trying to put a report together on the issue. The Government produced an outline draft heads of a Bill. Professor John Sweeney, a leading expert in this area, put in substantial time and effort to produce a report. The Minister has that report for over seven months.

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