Pat Buckley (Cork East, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The Civil Defence, the Garda, local councils and everybody else were amazing. It must be acknowledged that the emergency payments to households and businesses have been very well received. It is still a crap show down there at the moment. I will be lucky to have my office open for Christmas but it is only an office and people's homes, businesses and lives have been deeply affected. I think there is a public meeting next Tuesday. People want to know what the plan is going forward. We cannot predict everything. There is no certainty, but is there going to be a plan? We hope the so-called new flood warning system is to be rolled out in the near future. Will there be a system? The Minister of State heard what I relayed in my opening statement from one of the witnesses. We do not have anywhere to go. Even as a public representative, when I met with the municipal district officer last week and asked him who I turn to and who is going to be the co-ordinator if this hits again I was told that there is nobody. Is it possible to support local and county councils to come up with a contingency plan, even a basic emergency number if an event like this happens again in the near future? I hope it never does, but at least we as public representatives and those who work for the council and county council will have an avenue to follow if the crap hits again. We need to get a plan in place because on the Sunday I had to ring two different Garda stations to get through to an area engineer to try to get sandbags released from Collins Barracks because the demand was so high. Unfortunately, that could not be done. We had volunteers and companies that donated all of this, which was fabulous, but we need a contingency plan for the future. How could we push this forward?

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