Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I might come back to Deputy Healy-Rae's points but first, it is absolutely right that we are discussing flooding and what happened in Donegal this summer. We should also think outside that box and think of the people of Puerto Rico tonight. One week on from the hurricane that hit the island, there are one million people who do not have power. It is 90° there, if Members can imagine that. Out of 69 hospitals, only 11 have either power or fuel. Their entire agriculture system has been wiped out. We can go across the world and see the same this summer. In Bangladesh in recent weeks, hundreds of thousands of people have had everything they have washed away. We have to think big around what is actually happening. It is climate change and we must be clear about it, and in fairness to the Minister of State I heard him say it on the radio when the flash flood hit Donegal. I am sure he heard the people in Donegal saying that they had never seen this before. Lord knows that Donegal is used to rain, but this was not in the area of Donegal that we would expect floods.

Perhaps the Minister of State could come back to me, if not tonight then with a written response, on the following matter. The OPW conducted a detailed assessment of some 70,000 houses it saw as immediate flood risk. I would love to know if any of the houses that were flooded in Inishowen were on that list. What happened in Donegal, like what is happening in so many places, is outside the ordinary. As a result of climate change, everything is outside the ordinary. We must prepare for it.

We have to protect ourselves and seek to prevent. We cannot just do protection after the fact; we have to stop it. We must all do something to stop it happening, whether we are in Puerto Rico, Bangladesh or anywhere else. While there is uncertainty about having a five or ten-year horizon, if we keep going as we are, we will tip the world into being uninhabitable for tens of thousands of years. That is the scale of the crisis we face and our responsibility.

Deputy Danny Healy-Rae and I may have different views, but I keep coming back to the central point I always make to him. Protecting and preventing are better for Irish farmers. What we need to do is work with nature as it is the clever thing to do, but that does not necessarily mean dredging every river. In many cases, the best scientists I hear talking about how to prevent and protect say we should actually give rivers room to move rather than build every wall and dredge every stream as if it were going to solve the problem. Deputy Danny Healy-Rae and I can sit down together. He can bring his experts and I can bring mine and in a very civil way we can see what is the better approach. The Dutch and others know a thing or two about river and water management, but they made the mistake of culverting the whole River Rhine. They now tell me that they realise that does not work as one cannot beat nature. One cannot tunnel, funnel and manage it that way. It is better to work with it. In farming it is better to work with it. My heart goes out to those farmers in County Donegal and I agree with Fianna Fáil in its motion that they need support. My heart also goes out to those grain farmers who I am told again face a fairly serious problem this autumn. God help us, it is going to start to rain in the next few days. Are they going to face what they had to face last year when the harvest was flattened and they were picking corn up off the ground in November?

While one can ignore Met Éireann which does not seem to have a clue what is happening, our best scientists in Maynooth are saying that while they cannot be certain, the north, west and south west of the country will see a lot more rain with more intense bursts, which is what we saw happen in County Donegal. However, the south and the east are likely to see less and we are likely to face drought in this couintry, as hard as that is to believe.

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