Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I want to thank him for that.

I would be happy to have a debate on that and on climate change more generally but that would be up to the Business Committee. We will need to examine what a national red alert means. It was the first time we have ever had a national red alert and the whole country only went red on Sunday, 15 October, at 1 p.m., when certain decisions had to be made. One decision was to close schools and that was made within a few hours of the national red alert issuing. A decision was made that we could not leave it up to individual school boards and so on to decide and that it had to be done on a national basis. It caused genuine confusion for some people in the private sector because it was unclear to people as to whether or not they were to go into work. The advice we gave people was not to do any unessential travel but going to work is essential for many people. We will have to develop a better understanding of what a red alert means beyond the public sector and what it means in the private sector.

I am not sure if a national text alert is still in the offing. SMS is used much less frequently than it was in the past. It is probably dying out as a technology. People tend to use WhatsApp, Internet messages and so on. Any consideration would have to give some view to that and what the correct mechanism for informing people would be. I would like to say, as Deputy Martin said, that the media, and the national media in particular, were very helpful in getting messages out, including RTE, TV3 and others. The front page headlines on the newspapers on Monday morning were also very helpful. I do not think anyone who saw the front pages of the major newspapers on Monday morning could be in any doubt as to how serious the storm was.

The national adaptation framework consultation is open until 27 October, so we are still in the consultation phase. Once the Minister has the opportunity to consider the submissions, it will be brought to Government and published thereafter.

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