Martin Kenny (Sligo-Leitrim, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

When I got up this morning the first thing I had to do was go out and get a five-gallon drum and a drop of petrol to put it in the generator. For the last three days we have had a generator that I borrowed from somebody else when their power came back. The network said the power would be back today but now it is saying that it will be next Sunday before it will be back for the five or six houses around me. This is the case for hundreds and thousands of people across my constituency and the whole north west who are left without power. They continually get these communications telling them that it is going to come back and then it does not. Then it is a couple of days more and they are waiting and hoping it will come back soon. Before we got the generator it was hot water bottles and a Superser heater. The novelty wears off very quickly and it has worn off an awful lot of people. We are healthy and we are fine but there are hundreds of people out there who have children with disabilities in the house, who have very elderly parents in the house, and who simply cannot cope. They feel very much left alone and left aside in all of this.

The majority of these problems, perhaps 70% or 80%, are caused by afforestation. Forests have grown up. Where the power lines go through the forests there is supposed to be a 10 m corridor. Trees, however, have grown 30 m tall and one does not need to be a genius to know that when the wind comes they will fall on the lines. There are hundreds of trees on top of power lines. I have seen them and walked through them, and hundreds of trees on top of the trees that are on top of the power lines. I spoke to some of the French people who came over here to assist - and they are all doing tremendous work, as are the ESB people and the people from the local authorities from everywhere - but they said they cannot understand why we have let the trees so close to the power lines. They ask "What is going on in this country?" I know why. It is because profit was the driving force when afforestation was going in and big grants were available. The more land planted the more money one got. Five years ago, when the Dáil sat in the convention centre, I brought forward a Bill that proposed a requirement for planning permission for forestry. It was voted down by practically everybody in the House, bar Sinn Féin. It was voted down and people said "No". If we had planning permission for such forestry then the local authorities would at least have some control over what is going on. There is no control whatsoever.

On the issue of welfare and the problems out there that have been mentioned, there are farmers with sheds down, roofs are gone and businesses have lost massive amounts of money where whole freezers full of food are gone. They have insurance but under the insurance there are rules, one of which concerns whether it was caused by an overall outage, in which case one gets nothing. Something needs to be done for them. There is also the rule whereby the first €500 of the claim is not paid, for example. If the total claim is for €800, €900 or €1,000 the person may not put in a claim if he or she was only to get a small bit of it, yet because they have an insurance policy they are entitled to nothing according to the Government.

There needs to be some way of looking after these people. The Government has let people down in this situation. I absolutely understand that this storm was unprecedented and the worst we have ever seen but a whole lot of issues were foreseeable. A lot of people, or anyone with a bit of cop on, could tell that power lines going through forests beside trees that were growing 30 m tall were going to be brought down. Anyone would tell you that; we have all seen that. I have been preaching this for years and nobody will listen because all that matters is profit. That is the problem in this country. We have to recognise that there need to be clear avenues for the power lines to go through so the trees will not bring them down on top of people.

There are issues in respect of welfare. Hundreds of people get in touch with my office all the time who have filled in the humanitarian assistance forms but cannot get any response. They only get a pittance of money.

Freezers are a big issue. People have lost the contents of their freezers and are told it does not matter because it is not an immediate need. For people who go to their freezer and take out the food to thaw for eating that day, it is an immediate need but they are told they cannot get money for it. There needs to be a rethink about that. The Government needs to recognise that many people live by buying food and having it in their freezer to use. They did not put it there forever. They put it there so they could take it out and eat it some day. Now that it is gone, they are told it is hard luck. That is simply not good enough.

The Defence Forces were mentioned. I have seen no members of the Defence Forces in Leitrim and I have been around a lot of the forests. None of them are doing anything. They could be there. We do not need skilled workers. We need people to pull lines 300 m or 400 m through the forest. We need people to carry tools for the technicians who are going to put up what is necessary. The Defence Forces could do all that work but have not been called out. There is so much we could do. I hear on the radio all the time that one of the causes of this problem is that people living in rural areas are living in the wrong places. I live approximately 1 km from a village and 200 m from the N4 and the main Sligo to Dublin railway line. I am not in the middle of nowhere and I have no power. People who live in rural areas also deserve to have services. This Government must stand up for those people. We have been sitting around for the two weeks since this storm happened. The whole country is in absolute devastation and the Government refused to come back and sit. It is ridiculous.

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