Mattie McGrath (Tipperary, Independent) | Oireachtas source

You said Regional Independent Group. I am not deaf. Or am I? There are other Members here too. It is not just you, Acting Chairman. Other Members have referred to us as everything. We were bad enough to be tied in with a cabal that Shane Ross had before the last election. We were mixed up with them. We have a clear identity. We are rural people and proud of it. We are representing rural Ireland and urban Ireland, of which we are proud.

I wish the Minister of State very well in his Ministry and I thank him for responding to areas, especially during the summer in Bantry and west Cork, which I visited. I saw the Cosy Cabin pub and the damage and devastation done there. We look forward to working with the Minister of State as we know he is progressive.

I thank Deputy Canney. When he was Minister of State, he came to my own area in Clonmel and other areas to look at issues there. We need to get this moving. We have talking about this and CFRAM reports. Consultants take up most of the money. There might be €1 billion in the plan but the consultants will take at least half of that. Consultants are needed to pick a bush or clear an eye in a bridge. It is silly.

I have to take issue with Deputy Cairns from west Cork. When I saw the flooding in Bantry, I saw the beautiful the old mill wheel at the river. A child or a blind person could see that it was blocked. There was only 2 ft of space for water to go into. The culverts must be cleaned. The road inlets must be cleaned, as must the trees and bushes which obstruct the water flow off the roads. I am not a climate change denier but I am for common sense. Not a bush would meet one on two roads. We have a river in Goatenbridge where Knockmealdown Active does great work with canoes and kayaking. One cannot go down the river, however. It is like a treasure hunt to get around the trees as they are blocked. It is silly.

I want to salute the work of Tipperary County Council, under Walter Doherty and his team. When we had huge floods in Ardfinnan, they were out working might and main with families to keep the water out of houses. I salute our newly appointed Garda Sergeant Niall O'Halloran, and all the community, who work together so hard, as well as the overseer in Ballymacarbry, County Waterford, Guy Roe, and his team, and Lanny Walsh, and John O'Meara in Cahir. They are at the front line but we do not have enough of them. The real problem is simple. There is no maintenance of the roadways, of the inlets or of the watercourses.

When I was a young county councillor back in 1990, I put a motion forward to Tipperary County Council that we do an inventory of every water gully, culvert, invert and drain. We would have them forever as a result. Some of them have been lost because they were blocked by farmers and construction when they should not have been. If we had an inventory map, we could argue the point. Under the Roads Act 1993, we have powers to put water in off the roads into lands. We have to get Deputy Cairns's water off the roads to keep the roads. Once one gets water on the roads, one can get frost on the road and it disintegrates with huge damage to cars. I am surprised with that kind of talk that Deputy Cairns is against our part of the motion for cutting the bushes. Is it okay to take the eyes out of people? Is it okay to block the roads with the water flowing down the road instead of inside the ditch? It is nonsense talk. She should get on the wellies and go out to understand what is going on in these situations.

The OPW did a great job in Clonmel with a 97% success rate. It is pure nonsense and folly, however, if we are going to let the river build up every year. Every bit of dirt that comes off this building and any building today goes down into the gullies and is washed into the river. It is the same for farms or anything else off the roads. This keeps rising. I was surprised to hear Deputy Canney talking about putting the silt back into the rivers. The silt must be taken out because otherwise the rivers choke. All the schemes in the world will not keep the water out of Clonmel because the river will rise over it. It is a simple thing. If I fill this half empty jug of water here with stones, it will overflow. It is as simple as that. I am not an engineer or an expert but I am not an eejit either. I have worked in this area.

Farmers and landowners know this. My God, do the people in the houses know when they are up to their elbows in water and sewage. I have seen people with high waders going into their houses, including John Maher in Ardfinnan, Tommy Myles and others. That happens time after time. At this time of year when the flood weather season comes, people cannot sleep at night. People got the special doorways off the OPW. They are a help but no help when the sewage comes up the pipes. When I walked down the street in Bantry, I saw gullies and tarmac lifted up. That tells one that the water cannot get away. Water will find its own level anywhere and everywhere. We have to have common sense.

I know of a family in Fethard, Dympna and John O'Donovan, whose house is in a place that gets flooded. They have been dealing with the OPW for the past four years, begging for a relocation scheme or money to put the house up. In Carrick-on-Suir, the family who own Treacy Fuel built a house on silts, like in Denmark. They did not get a bob for it because they did not wait for the scheme to do it. It is shameful. These people are showing leadership but the OPW is too slow. The schemes are too slow and too bureaucratic.

We do not get enough money. The River Aherlow floods at the Killaldriffe Bridge at Kilmoyler. Will the Minister of State come down to Tipperary where I can show him two or three places where flood schemes have been done successfully and where they are badly needed? There are schemes in my own village of Newcastle and near Dolan's SuperValu in Cahir. Deputy Canney saw those great schemes when he was a Minister of State and had them pushed along. More of them should be streamlined, however, and we should be able to do it differently.

I want to thank our own local community employment scheme supervisor, Seán Byrne. The men in that scheme helped with sandbags to deal with flooding in the school recently. If one does not keep the drains cleaned, one is going to get flooding. With the sink in the bathroom, if the drain gets blocked, it will flow over. It is not rocket science. We do not need consultants. We do not need people with engineering degrees coming out of their ears. We need common sense. When we had the men on the ground in the county councils and the OPW, these things were done. Sadly, we have no men. We have all pen-pushers now while outdoor staff have been reduced to a skeleton. The areas they have to cover are massive. If they sat into their trucks and drove them for the day, they would not drive across their areas, not to mind work them. That is the problem. We should have made that inventory of watercourses. In legal cases, we could have proved the point. They were there on the map but now they are gone and the damage is enormous.

With clear felling, which involves timber being harvested and taken away by machines, the damage caused by water flowing down afterwards is reckless. Then we have fellows who want to object to everything. We saw it in Cork. I saw schemes going on and a judicial review. I accept people have rights. However, we must balance rights with common sense too. We must balance rights with the loss of property.

Insurance loves a drop of water. I have heard cases today of people on high land. I have it too in Kilsheelan. They would not be flooded even if Noah's Ark sank. The insurance company drew a line through it because they are racketeers and gangsters. They have never been touched by this or previous Governments. There has been review after review of the industry. Now with the pandemic, they will not insure people for this, that or the other. They just take money and use the small print to get out of every claim.

It is no fun having a house or a business flooded. It is less fun when they flood annually. I agree there is more rain. I am not denying climate change. We need to maintain the watercourses we have and make new ones. However, we need the man on the ground with the shovel. I am a machinery man myself. We need the man with the shovel to do the small, tidy and neat work. When the farmers were working, all the drains in the fields were cleaned at this time of the year. October was the month for it. The water did not come onto the roads as a result. Our roads are being abused. We have a finite amount of money to keep the roads. A county engineer told me that one passage of a fully laden truck is the equivalent of 30,000 cars. The trucks of the conglomerates and the milk tanks are large but they have to go. We need to think wisely and be strategic. Above all, we need to have human schemes. These material schemes are not working.

That publican I visited cannot avail of the scheme due to technicalities and other reasons. It is futile to put schemes in place and invest money when we do not do the necessary work of providing drainage and clearing rivers. As Deputy Healy-Rae said, there were more fish in rivers when they were cleared. I thank Inland Fisheries Ireland, Mr. Alan Cullagh and his brother and others who worked with me in Tipperary. They are understanding and they want to work with the farmers. Farmers do not want to damage the environment. They want to drain their land and allow for fast-flowing rivers. The port in Waterford, where the River Suir runs into the sea, used to be cleaned every ten years. It has not been cleaned now for 30 or 40 years. Silt is rising continually. There is not very much common sense in this place. It seems to be a scarce commodity. Bureaucrats take over and we have no men on the ground to do the work. Sin mar a deir sé. Tá gach rud faoin urlár

It is time for common sense. Our motion represents common sense and I utterly reject the Minister of State's attempt to delay this again through his amendment. He is trying to kick it down the road for another time. That is not usually his approach. It is not the way he operates. I have watched him since he came in here. I wish him well in his role, but we do not want this amendment. We want simple and plain action now. We do not want big schemes and grand designs. Look after the little things. The late Albert Reynolds, a former Taoiseach, said, "It’s the little things that trip you up", but if they are tended to properly, they will not trip us up. Let us let the people who want to clean rivers and streams get to work. We do not need the ecology watchers. Deputy Cairns said that some are going around watching the jobs that are being done. Let us look after the people, not watch them and penalise them.

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