Michael Fitzmaurice (Roscommon-Galway, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Office of the Ceann Comhairle for accepting this issue and the Minister, Deputy Denis Naughten, for attending. It will soon be a year since parts of areas both he and I represent, including Ballinaheglish, Brackloon, Ballyglass, Smaghraan and all areas around Roscommon and Galway, got a ferocious pounding. Family life was disrupted by the massive amount of flooding in those areas. A new Government has been formed in the past year and funding has had to be made available to address the flooding. The Minister and all politicians, including me, have lobbied constantly to try to get relief to address the nightmare endured by many families over the past year. The Minister's Department carried out GSI surveys in the area. Some works could not be carried out. We were all lobbying for machines to open channels that were not opened in many years, where there were bushes growing and where water was being blocked. The good news is that Roscommon County Council, in fairness to it, has brought in machines in recent weeks to try to do work. Ironically, last Saturday - it was not Friday, although the machine had been working at the location for a few weeks - work was stopped by the fisheries. I refer not only to Brackloon but to all the areas that have suffered the torture of flooding in the past year, especially across the west. We have to make sure that when some remedial flood prevention work commences, we use a bit of common sense. We are all trying to get this work done.

I have worked throughout Ireland on several jobs, including on the River Liffey, a canal and most of the big rivers laying pipes and doing various other jobs. I am not going to say everything was perfect and that all our paperwork was 100%. I will never say that because the man who does so is foolish, but the one thing I ask is that, in light of the urgency, especially along the Shannon and in counties Roscommon, Galway, Mayo, Westmeath and Longford, which have been very hard hit and where families have had to endure torture, the Minister give a direction to his Department, which is responsible for fisheries, to ensure someone will say we need to do X, Y and Z if things are not 100% right. If there is paperwork to be done, we should sit down and do it. I am not saying we should not dot the i's and cross the t's. What has happened is that a machine has been idle for nearly a week. The driver has gone home and the machine has been left there. The Minister knows the area as well as I do. They were actually working on a dry drain. It was going up to near Ballinaheglish, where there is basically a reedbed. Will the Minister give a direction to his Department to ensure that when it finds something or believes something is not right, it will work straight away with the relevant authority or farmer - there may be different scenarios in different circumstances - and rectify it while keeping the work going. The latter is the important part. Neither the Minister nor I, or any other Deputy, wants the rain to come hammering down in a month's time only to have people again go through the torture they went through last year.

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