Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State for his reply.

We need to ensure in the future that the town defences are done. There is no question about that. In parallel, there is a need for a small works scheme for all the rural areas. In all of those areas, by their nature, quite modest funding would do a major amount of work but, normally, the hold-up there is administrative. A number of things need to be done, the first of which is to put a budget aside not only for the towns, but also for rural areas that are affected because a house is a house no matter where it is located.

Second, we need to speed up putting schemes through the process. The Minister of State dealt with that issue. He recognises that one will always get the conservative line of the Minister stating that we will not have the funding, but what most of us found in the end is that one often wound up with more money than schemes because there are inordinate delays with such matters as planning and the National Parks and Wildlife Service, NPWS.

The third issue, as I mentioned earlier, is that there should be a uniform protocol put in place to deal with traffic diversions that spans across counties because often at a county border the neighbouring county will not have signs up to say that one cannot get down a particular road. That sort of thing was evident over the weekend.

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