Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

Thankfully, much of Dublin escaped the worst ravages of Storm Éowyn but I know that, across the country, tens of thousands of people suffered extreme hardship as a result of water and power outages. The lack of resilience of our key infrastructure in those areas of water and power exposed extreme vulnerabilities in our ability to respond to emergency situations. Some, including some in this House, who scoffed at weather warnings before the storm should, quite honestly, hang their heads in shame. We obviously need to do an emergency audit of our electricity grid and our water infrastructure to make sure they are going to be weather resilient. The destruction wreaked on forests should prompt us once again to think about the monoculture model of forestry in this country because monocultures of Sitka spruce, planted in straight lines, are much more vulnerable to being knocked over during storms. They also make flooding worse.

We need a system like Scotland's to get emergency payments to people. In Scotland, rather than people having to go through the rigmarole of the community welfare officer, emergency payments are sent directly to people as soon as they are impacted by severe weather events. We need to think again about the outsourcing of much of the ESB's and Irish Water's work to contractors that robs them of the direct capacity to do a lot of the jobs. Workers in the ESB went on strike a few years ago precisely because of the contracting out of their work, which lessened their capacity to respond to emergencies like this.

This also highlights our ability to deal with all sorts of emergencies. Last week, workers from the National Ambulance Service came to me and I was shocked when they told me that in Scotland, which has the same population as Ireland, there are 6,196 people working in the ambulance service, whereas in Ireland, we have 2,321, less than half of what they have in Scotland. Our ambulance service, a key emergency service, is an instance of an area where we are massively understaffed and underresourced. We need to get those resources in place.

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