Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

We deal with this every year there are instances of flooding. As a matter of interest, we initiated our emergency plans in Clare and in Tralee in County Kerry on 6 December. In both instances, there were small-scale levels of flooding during the week of 4, 5 and 6 December. If Deputy Dooley wishes to draw individual cases to my attention, where he would like to see families getting more, he might give me the details. Certainly, the cost of pumps have been supplied.

I have attended a number of the community welfare service clinics in rural areas and I have met and spoken to the community welfare officers who were on the ground during the floods right around the country. Our staff and the senior staff in charge have also been around the country. They have gone to all the co-ordination meetings of the Government group and agency groups dealing with the flooding. As we speak, a significant number of payments have been made and, at this point in time, there have been payments to approximately 250 families to 300 families.

We are expecting more claims to come in. Our experience is that in the initial stages, many people do not make a claim or, if they do, it is for small-scale stuff such as bed clothing or clothing that has been destroyed. If contaminated water has passed through a property, the claim is to replace foodstuffs and so on that have been contaminated. There is then the second stage. White goods, for instance, fridges and freezers on a ground floor, may have been destroyed.

What we do there is ask people to get estimates of what has to replaced and we work with those estimates as flexibly as we can. That really depends on people bringing the estimates forward, although often people are not in a position to do so for several weeks, until the house has dried out. In extreme cases, it could be longer and where there is very significant damage to a home, it could be months as it might be necessary to get engineering opinions and the OPW's opinion. We have done that, for instance, in counties Clare and Galway, particularly south Galway, on previous occasions. As Minister, I dealt with the aftermath of the disastrous floods that took place in the west in 2009 and the subsequent flooding in 2010. In approximately 20 cases, families were given sanction to move home on the advice of the OPW, local authority engineers and their own engineers. To date - I am talking about 2012 - approximately 14 families have moved and rebuilt homes on ground safer from flooding.

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