Marcella Corcoran Kennedy (Laois-Offaly, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to discuss the dreadful flooding our country has experienced in recent months. I acknowledge the distress and trauma experienced by many families, businesses and landowners over the past several weeks and commend the emergency services on their excellent work in helping people.

When urban areas are affected they always make the headlines. However, an area with which I am very familiar, west County Offaly, experiences annual flooding along the River Shannon. As a rule the flooding affects the surrounding land, but homes can also be flooded. The areas along the Shannon Callows are particularly prone to flooding.

In fact, I was out visiting some of the towns and villages over the past couple of weeks. I visited Shannon Harbour, Shannonbridge and Banagher, and to see the water levels was truly frightening because the river is a force to be reckoned with. We are insignificant in the face of the force of that volume of water.

It is when summer flooding hits that we are really in trouble in my area. The landowners and the farmers are particularly impacted by this because it usually occurs at the time when they would be harvesting their crops. When the river floods twice a year, then we are in real trouble.

The Shannon is 360 km long and flows through 11 counties. It is a significant resource for all of us and it has tremendous benefits. It is only when we see its force and the damage it can also do that we really focus on it, as, of course, we must do.

In July 2012, the Joint Oireachtas Committee on the Environment, Culture and the Gaeltacht produced a report, entitled "Eight Proposals urgently required to tackle Flooding on the River Shannon, its tributaries and the waters feeding into it", in which we examined all of the reports to date on the Shannon and on which we did not hold hearings because we felt there was no need. We had already heard everything and enough has been written about it. I cannot help but think that if any efforts had been made to put into practice what we had recommended in that report, some of the trauma experienced by those in the area might have been averted. The recommendations were simple and, we would have felt, easy to implement.

The first recommendation we made was that one agency would oversee the management of the River Shannon and its tributaries and waters. The second was that the Shannon would be maintained. The third was that local engagement and consultation would be in place. The other recommendations were that appropriate water levels would be maintained; that we would prevent and alleviate the build up of silt; that we would put flood warning systems and emergency management in place; that we would utilise the bog lands - these are like sponges in the middle of the country - to attenuate water from the river when necessary; and that we would protect our natural heritage.

Of course, our biggest problem is that there are so many agencies paralysing each other in terms of what needs to be done. That is the difficulty. The other problem is that two years remain before the Shannon CFRAM plan is completed. They have three years of work done already but there are two more years of looking at hydrology and other matters to figure out how this will be done.

We felt that putting one agency in control but working in partnership with the others was the correct way to go. Having agencies such as Bord na Móna, ESB, Waterways Ireland, OPW, the National Parks and Wildlife Service, and the landowners and home dwellers all in the one mix and nobody in control is the problem that we identified, and this has been the case for many years. We cannot have another report. We must deal with this, and soon.

The Shannon Callows are our greatest concern. From the weir in Athlone to Melick and Victoria Lough has to be dealt with. There are all sorts of issues with regard to water management, who controls the weir in Athlone and navigation. It is considerable. If only somebody had paid attention to our report. I call on anybody involved to read, digest and implement it.

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