Jennifer Whitmore (Wicklow, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

It is 13 days since Storm Éowyn ripped through the country, including many homes, businesses and farms, causing devastation for so many, especially in the west and north west. It has been a very difficult period for people. When they saw there was no Dáil sitting last week, they really were asking where their politicians and leaders were. I agree with them. Unfortunately, the Government seemed to disappear when the storm happened. It kept the head down and only popped it up in the past few days with some solutions to the problems being raised. It was particularly difficult for Opposition and, I would imagine, Government back bench TDs when constituents were raising issues directly impacting them and their homes and asking specific questions, with no opportunity for those TDs to raise the questions with the Minister on the floor of the Dáil. That is something the Government should learn from. Many people in the country were living through a crisis and the Dáil was not sitting.

We need to contrast the Government’s activity with that of the likes of the ESB, Uisce Éireann, local authorities and many community organisations throughout the country and their sacrifice and work to ensure the impacts of the storm were mitigated as quickly as possible. I acknowledge their efforts and, indeed, those of the workers who came from overseas to help us when we needed them.

The Government has used the phrase that the storm was "without precedent". That is absolutely true in that we have never seen anything like it in recent history. However, it should not have been unexpected and we should have been preparing for it. There has been warning after warning about the fact we would see more intense storms. Our climate is changing. When the Minister and I sat together on the climate committee, we would have had these discussions. The storm should not have come as a surprise to anybody. Our climate is changing and has changed. What we have not really considered in the Dáil and in this country is the issue of adaptation. We rightly tend to spend a lot of time on the mitigation side of climate action, but the adaptation side needs equal focus. That was clearly illustrated over the past couple of weeks. We are not going to be able to prevent these storms. We do not know when they are going to happen. A one in a hundred years storm could happen next week or in a hundred years – we do not know – but science and technology enable us to be much better at predicting them. As a State, we are, or should be, in a much better place to prepare for them. That is where the gap was this week. There was no plan, and that could be seen in the response of the Government, especially in the most rural and local communities.

This is not just rhetoric saying the Government has no plan because it actually had no plan. There is an emergency response framework for flooding and there are plans for nuclear, rail and maritime disasters. For some reason, we do not have an emergency response plan for storms despite having had Storm Ophelia and a multitude of other very serious storms over the years. This is a huge oversight and it needs to be rectified immediately.

I had a briefing from the ESB yesterday and the Government TDs probably had also. What was clear from it was that the logistics the ESB had to apply were incredible. Thousands upon thousands of staff, whether on the ground or in call centres, were reaching out to vulnerable people, organising accommodation and doing all that kind of work. It really felt to me, however, that the ESB was left to do the heavy lifting on this and that the problem was seen as one of electricity supply. Obviously it was, but we did not see support from or heavy lifting being done by the likes of the HSE in reaching out to GPs and health centres to ensure the latter had generators. Schools were without power for weeks and there was no remote learning for children. All sorts of measures were required so there should have been a whole-of-government response. We did not see that.

I was most concerned about our most vulnerable. We heard people on the radio a lot saying they felt they had been left behind. That was their experience. They referred to the difficulties they faced in getting water, keeping warm and cooking food. I refer to people with disabilities and the elderly. The one thing on which they were all consistent was the lack of contact from the Government.

Let me refer to other thing that really struck me. I was worried about the people who were not able to get to their emergency hubs to charge their phones to make calls to the radio stations. Who was looking after the people who did not have a bus to bring them to the centres and who had no one looking out for them? The Government needs to step in to ensure the most vulnerable will be supported.

I also refer to agriculture because what we have seen over recent weeks really demonstrates how vulnerable the sector is to climate change and these kinds of climate events.

We need to have a much greater focus on helping our farmers to transition to be able to deal with these events. However, I also want to call on the Minister of State because, unfortunately, we did not have the Minister for agriculture in the Chamber today. The horticulture sector is one that has been hit particularly badly by these storms. It is a sector that creates 7,000 jobs, which brings a huge amount of value to our economy, but it is also a sector that sort of lives on the margins. It is not one of the big earners when it comes to farming. People in this sector are going to find it very difficult to get over the damage and the costs they have accrued over the course of this storm. I ask that the Minister of State reach out and perhaps talk to the Minister and ask for a support scheme for those people to make sure they actually get to continue to produce beyond this storm event.

See this speech in context