Ruairí Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The Minister was in the Cooley Peninsula and Carlingford recently. She saw some of the devastation there. We welcome the supports in the form of the humanitarian assistance fund and the emergency business flooding relief scheme. I hope there will be plenty of flexibility because sometimes we have more questions with every person we see.

Antóin Watters and I were at a meeting yesterday with some of the Minister's party colleagues and a great many farmers. There is a need for something specific for farmers. If we are talking about roads and roads infrastructure, and we have already seen the local authority do some sort of work, I imagine that an element of finance will be required from central government for that. A number of roads would have been dealt with under the local improvement scheme and have been absolutely devastated. We are talking about places that are absolutely impassable. In some cases, the locals have put in place stopgap measures, but we need to look at something specific. Everybody realises there will be huge assessment work done that will involve everyone from Irish Water to the local authorities right through to Coillte to make sure we can carry out what mitigations are necessary so we limit the devastation that may befall people into the future.

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