Jennifer Whitmore (Wicklow, Social Democrats)

I welcome the Minister of State's indication that he is open to reviewing the Arterial Drainage Act. We have heard a lot this afternoon about the financial, emotional and social cost of flooding. When flooding hits people's homes, businesses or land, it is very difficult. Aside from climate change and a changing weather regime, one of the reasons we experience such large and problematic flood events is the effect of the Arterial Drainage Act. We have come from a situation where our rivers were not seen as entities within their own right but just as channels, their primary purpose being to drain water from agricultural land and get it out to sea as quickly as possible. We absolutely will not be able to engineer our way out the climate impacts, changes and events we see coming towards us.

As a Government and as a society, we need to look at our rivers and see how we can move them back to the more natural way they operated. We must start putting the meanders back in. Up to now, we have, in essence, seen them as channels. We wanted to straighten them because we needed them to move water quickly. That is why the water moves very quickly when there is a flood or heavy rain event. It is really important that we bring our rivers back to their natural way. When we talk about flood relief, we need to look upstream to see what we can do. We have disconnected ourselves so far from our natural environment that it is very hard for us to trust natural solutions. When we look to the UK, we can see the success of that approach. While pursuing flood mitigation measures, which is the engineering solution, it would be really interesting, even in a few pilot samples, to also do the upstream work, including rewetting, planting and rewiggling the rivers, to see whether that work can provide a solution and negate the need for flood mitigation works. We would still have the insurance policy of those works but initiating some pilots would prove concept. I ask the Minister of State to look into it.

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