Michael Fitzmaurice (Roscommon-Galway, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to speak on this matter. It is nearly three weeks since this bomb hit the west, the midlands and the north west. It is good to see people coming back but, my God, three weeks is a long time. Eamon Ryan's dream of air-to-water heat pumps turned into a nightmare for most people. They were perished in their houses. Thank God a lot of people had a chimney. We should go back and make sure that people are allowed chimneys in all counties because what some people endured was catastrophic.

I commend the ESB - the people on the ground, not the people up at the top. There is a lot of talk about infrastructure. I have gone around the whole place and our problem is trees. Corridors of trees in woodlands were on top of the wires. They were on roads and on cables, be they communications cables or ESB cables. That is what caused the problem everywhere and we have got to address it.

A lot of contractors helped. A lot of farmers will need hedge cutting and other such jobs to be done. For those people, the Minister must consider extending the period when such work can be done beyond the end of this month. We must learn from this experience. We can give out but we need to learn from it.

The Minister has group water schemes within the remit of his Department. He must arm them now for the future; likewise with design, build, operate, DBO, contracts. He must haul in Irish Water because it should be prepared for something like this happening again. That is in the Minister's gift and he needs to do it. Sadly, the Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment, Deputy Peter Burke, seems to have disappeared. A budget must be put in place for small businesses and also for the likes of crèches and other such places.

There is not one word out of anyone as to how we are going to help small businesses. They have been closed and they need to have a back-up. We need to make sure we do that.

While I welcome that the Minister has not been on his new phone all the time, there is one thing I will ask of him. We need to look straightaway to see what we can do for local communities in reinforcement, be it through small generators or a grant towards them, especially for those who have underlying problems and for community hubs to make sure they are armed. On the humanitarian side, and I know the Minister is familiar with this, it seems to just concern the house in one form such as a fridge getting into trouble or maybe damage at the house. Outside of that, however, we have turf. There is another issue that some Minister needs to address, namely, the targeted agriculture modernisation schemes, TAMS. While I welcome the Minister, Deputy Heydon's announcement on the generators, TAMS are not going to work for sheds that have lost their roofs because the roof is off the shed now and there are cows calving and weanlings are in the sheds. What farmers want are purlins and sheets to galvanise, to put it simply. We do not need to build a full new shed, put in our name and have someone three months later tell us we can do it and then go down the road of getting a 40% grant. We need a hard money-type fund this minute. I ask the Minister to talk to the other Ministers about this because this needs to be done. This is not complicated stuff; it is galvanised sheets and purlins. That is the big thing that has been taken away. Those farmers need help in that.

We need legislation shortly and I ask the Minister to ensure that in whatever legislation there is, there will not be some do-gooder saying that these trees are too close to the wires. I ask for that to be addressed. I am saying - and I am the first to say it - that we would sow two down the field but do not let anyone come along in a suit telling someone he or she cannot cut this after spending three weeks without electricity. This has to stop. The madness going on right across the country has to stop.

A lot of people hired petrol generators and had to pay extra for food when trying to get food in places. While I know there was some laid on, I ask him to look at that for those people because we need to learn from every little piece of what went wrong to try to rectify it.

In the line of the ESB, yes, investment needs to be done. Poles are broken in places but they had a damn good reason to break because it was big lumps of forestry trees that came down on them. Another thing that needs to be addressed, both in State and private forestry, is trees that came down on an adjacent farmer's field blowing the fences out of it. I ask the Government to look - it only has a week or two left - at the contractors who went in helping out right around the west and who had other work to do in the line of hedge cutting. I ask the Government to look at that.

I am saying very clearly to the Minister, in the context of rural Ireland, a lot of Ministers might not understand what went on but he is from the west and saw the destruction that happened. I am asking him on the line of the sheds that have been decimated - their roofs not their walls - that he please talk to someone to put a fund in place for that. TAMS will take too long. The summer will be landed and winter will be coming again and it will not be resolved. I ask the Minister to try to resolve that and the other issues I have mentioned here.

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