David Stanton (Cork East, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State for his response. It is a bit funny because, in one sense, everyone here is responsible and no one is responsible. This issue has moved from the Department of Transport to the Department of Agriculture, Food and Marine to the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage and to the local authorities. Ultimately, this responsibility will fall back on the landowners if an accident does occur. This is certainly going to happen because there are so many dead trees out there. They are dead. There are no leaves or bark on them. They are just dead.

We are in the middle of climate change and if we have more impacts from it and more severe storms next winter, then we will see quite a number of these trees coming down. Many are owned by farmers and landowners. These trees could actually fall on farmers themselves. They could fall during the middle of the dark nights and people could drive into them. It is, therefore, an extremely dangerous situation. I did ask the question earlier concerning insurance. If someone is aware or should be aware that a tree is dead and poses a danger, is he or she covered by insurance if it falls on somebody or would he or she be cleaned out if a case were to be taken in this regard and it was proved that person should have known the tree in question was dead and reasonable precautions should have been taken and the tree removed? The cost of taking down these trees is also quite expensive. It is also a dangerous job because if a tree is dead and rotten and an attempt is made to try to knock it down, it ends up being more dangerous than a healthy tree.

I ask the Minister of State, therefore, to go back to his Departmental and his ministerial colleagues across the Departments to emphasise the danger of this issue across the country. I am not sure which Department is responsible here, because they are all saying they are not, but if a tragedy occurs, and we hope it does not, but if it does, it will be raised in here and fingers will be pointed at Ministers and questions will be asked about why they did not do something. Everyone will be saying we should have done something. I am raising this issue now because I do not want to see this happening. I want to see every bit of caution being taken to take these trees out because they are a danger. I do not want to see any injuries or fatalities because of this situation in the coming winter or beyond. I again, therefore, ask the Minister of State to go back to his colleagues, notify the local authorities to go out and identify these trees and then notify the landowners to go out and take them down. I thank the Minister of State.

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