Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I too will be supporting the Bill and I thank Deputy Michael McGrath for bringing it before the House. Notwithstanding some of the weaknesses in it, I believe they are weaknesses that can be teased out. In any event, it is a response to inaction by the Government. The Minister of State, Deputy Seán Canney, looks a little uncomfortable, and I appreciate that. I certainly agree with the comments made by the previous speaker in regard to the Minister of State, Deputy Eoghan Murphy, whose speech utterly failed to deal with the problems which have been raised.

The Minister of State, Deputy Canney, was in Ballinasloe and spoke there. Even though I come from the Galway West constituency, which has been seriously hit by flooding both within the city and at Cong, Clonbur, Kilmaine and surrounding areas, it was an eye-opener for me to attend at Ballinasloe, a town I am very familiar with because I worked there for many years in the 1980s. It was an eye-opener because, first, the national flood conference was organised by a local group from Ballinasloe and Athlone and their level of professionalism was second to none. The facts and figures they put before us caused me to stop in my tracks and listen to what they were saying, and I took notes, as the Minister of State did. I came away from that conference and I thought that this is a group of people who are not asking for help; they are asking the Government to work with them. They did the work on the ground, not alone in collecting the data, but they did the work on the ground when the floods appeared and there were no services available from the Government.

I appeal to the Minister of State to listen because I know his heart is in the right place, whatever about Fine Gael. Fine Gael seems utterly out of touch and reliant on a private market which has utterly failed in the same way that it has failed to provide houses for our people, in the same way it has failed to control the astronomical rise in car insurance and in the same way it has relied on private companies to provide our health services. I appeal to the Minister of State to listen. Nobody is asking for charity, least of all the group that organised the conference in Ballinasloe.

I would like the Minister of State to comment in regard to the history of the Government and my difficulty in relying on its reassurances that it is going to do something. Some 300 areas have been identified by the Office of Public Works in regard to risk assessments and maps have been drawn up. The next step is obviously the course of action. The Minister of State is chairing the interdepartmental group. I sit on the Committee of Public Accounts, as the Minister of State knows. To our horror, it was brought to our attention some months ago by the Comptroller and Auditor General that a steering group established to plan Ireland's flood defences did not meet for four years until November 2014 - that is a black and white finding in the Comptroller and Auditor General's report. The report also found that an interdepartmental group set up to plan flood risk management, presumably the one now chaired by the Minister of State, did not meet for six years until July 2015. I could go on but there is no point. Those are the findings of the Comptroller and Auditor General, who generally gives very modest conclusions and sticks to facts. Therefore, I would not be at all reassured by the history to date of dealing with our flood problems.

Apart from housing and health, flooding was the biggest issue raised on the doorsteps as we went door to door. We promised and gave our word as candidates that, should we be elected, we would focus on housing, health, public transport and flooding. I make no apology for repeatedly standing up in this Chamber and focusing on those key issues.

Outside of Cork, Galway applied for and received the most in humanitarian assistance payments from the Department of Social Protection.

9 o’clock

The number of households in Galway that applied for humanitarian assistance from the Department of Social Protection was 158, a higher number than in Cork, at 74, although the households in Cork received higher payments, probably because of higher valuations.

I have great respect for the Office of Public Works which has done great work and is trying to do its best with a limited budget, but this Dáil and the Government have not grasped the enormity of the problem posed by flooding and provided the amount of money needed to provide flood defences. The issue of climate change has not been mentioned in this debate, but it is a fact of life. With others, I have repeatedly said this is our last opportunity to deal with it. Apart from bad planning and the failure to provide flood defences, the major cause of flooding is climate change. We still await the mitigation plan promised by the Government and it is almost December. I do not know how the Ministers of State can sit in silence in the face of the incontrovertible fact that climate change is happening and we have to take action. Where is the national mitigation plan that we were promised? We are already exceeding the emissions targets set for us and will pay millions of euro in fines for failing to take action. On every level we are failing utterly to deal with the problem. That is bad enough because each Government has been negligent, but it is completely unacceptable when community groups give us the facts and figures and beg us to work with them. I support the draft legislation, although, given my previous life in law, I see weaknesses in it. I have no choice but to support it because, at the very least, it might spur the Government into taking action and stop giving us bland and empty rhetoric that the market will provide solutions. We cannot rely on assurances from insurance companies that have absolutely no intention of keeping their word.

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