Rose Conway-Walsh (Mayo, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Tréaslaím leis an Aire on his new role. I wish him the best of luck. What a baptism of fire. Coming from Mayo, the same county as myself, the Minister, Deputy Calleary, will know how much we have suffered over the last two weeks. The Minister will also know it is absolutely unacceptable that 13 days after the storm people have no light and no water. I know the Minister will also have got all of the cases that have come across my desk in the last two weeks of the real hardship people have suffered with this storm. I put it to the Minister that the response was not good enough and it was not urgent enough. We knew in the days running into this storm that it would be unprecedented and that there had been nothing like it. We are very used to the harshest of storms in the coastal areas but we knew this was going to be something different. The crews should have been there, they should have been on standby and things should have been in place to be able to ensure that vulnerable people in particular were looked after. It is wholly unacceptable that there are people still sitting in Mayo who do not know when they will have light or water. As my colleagues have said, the Dáil should have been back here immediately. I feel that if there was a similar catastrophe in Dublin we would be back here sitting in the Dáil. It is not good enough.

I was on Midwest Radio this morning and I said that I had been frightened all week that something was going to happen and that somebody was going to die as a result of this in Mayo. I extend my condolences to the family of the man in Donegal who lost his life. Very shortly after this somebody from our own constituency rang me to describe to me how the equipment his father was using could not be used. He had the mattress, the sleep apnoea machine, and several other pieces of equipment. When he went to take him to the doctor his father died in front of them. That is the tragedy of it. That is how urgent this is.

I cannot understand why the Army was not brought in from day one. We have Defence Forces personnel and they should be trained in all of these things if they are not already trained. If they are not then I suggest they immediately are trained because we will have more storms like this. We did not have the Army in. We did not have the Dáil coming back. It took a number of days for the humanitarian aid to be put in place or to say that people could have alternative accommodation. This does not say "urgency" to me. There are lessons to be learned here but, as with many things, I fear that lessons do not get learned.

I really want to thank Midwest Radio. We would be absolutely lost without Midwest Radio for communication. When my colleagues and I met the ESB last week I said that they should be taking out adverts on Midwest Radio to communicate with people as well. I hope the role the radio station has played in this will be remembered when funding is distributed for broadcasting. Without the radio people would be completely lost altogether.

We talked about farmers earlier. We absolutely have to get farmers' sheds replaced as well. As the Minister will be aware, so many of these farmers are already waiting for their ACRES payments. On top of this now they have no sheds. Many farmers have lost fodder. I hear that an oyster farm has lost €160,000 worth of equipment and products. We cannot sit back. We must put schemes in place but the schemes have to be accessible and we have to get rid of the bureaucracy with it. That Uisce Éireann does not have generators is absolutely crazy and must be fixed. This also applies to the group water schemes. Funding must be made available for this.

This has laid absolutely bare how Mayo and rural Ireland have been neglected, and how the ESB and EirGrid have been let away by Governments not making the investments that needed to be made. Again, years ago we asked EirGrid so many times - back when I was on the council - to put some of those lines underground. They told us barefaced lies when they said it could not be done even though we knew from other countries that it could be done. There are many things to be learned from this. We need action on it. The most immediate action we need is for water and electricity be to reinstated within hours to the areas where it has not yet been, and particularly in Mayo.

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