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

I commend the many thousands of people around the country who put their shoulder to the wheel throughout the storm, including those in voluntary groups and agencies across the State who came out, the ESB workers and county council workers who worked day and night to get things moving again and the ordinary people and farmers who went out to cut bushes along the roads and took trees off the roads with their tractors to try to clear the place for people.

The humanitarian assistance scheme has been a real problem. The Minister has to acknowledge that. Many people made applications and thought they were going to get somewhere but were just turned down without any explanation. It is as if the system was just overwhelmed by what happened. I understand the storm was unprecedented and different from anything we had ever seen in the past but many of us, including my colleague here from Sligo-Leitrim, have seen it very often because many of the problems we had, particularly with power outages, related to the forestry problem. There are lines going through forests where the edge of the tree corridor is not far enough back, causing trees to bring down lines when they come down. Hundreds of people were left without power for weeks on end waiting for it to be restored. The reality is that, if there were the same kind of storm in a week's time, the same thing would happen because those trees are still there waiting to fall on the same lines. Last week, I accompanied a number of people with a delegation from Leitrim County Council to meet the Minister of State, Deputy Healy-Rae, in this regard. It is a real issue that must be dealt with urgently so that we can ensure that critical power and communications infrastructure is protected, particularly where it runs through forestry.

The people who own the forestry throw their hands up in the air and say there is nothing they can do about it. The ESB says it can do nothing about it. Everybody seems to be passing the buck to someone else. We need firm regulation to ensure the existing corridors are opened up and that where new forests are going in, wide corridors are left for infrastructure to go through.

I mentioned the various community organisations that came together. A lot of these community centres were the places people went to when they got power restored but they had to wait perhaps a week before that happened. There should be a scheme for them to have generators in place so that if a crisis like this happens again, it is somewhere people can go to charge their phone batteries or get a cup of tea or whatever. People were in real crisis. The issue with water was also a serious problem. When power went down, many people were left without water as well. I had no electricity for 13 days. My mother had none for 15 days and she is 92 years of age. That was common across our part of the country. This is a real issue. There was discussion about having a scheme in place but the scheme will only work in limited circumstances. When there is a big crisis like this, a scheme is needed that can ramp up to meet requirements. That needs to happen with urgency.

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