Jen Cummins (Dublin South Central, Social Democrats)

I ask colleagues to imagine it is a mid-July night, it is bucketing rain and there are warnings of high river waters and potential flooding of 1 m. A few hours later, the warning changes to 3 m of flooding and then to 5 m. Eventually, when it is dark and cold, there is an 8 m river flowing through the valley, destroying everything in its path and killing 135 of your neighbours. Thinking you are going to die, you sit on the roof and drink your best wine. The only thing you have to drink out of is the toothbrush holder you grabbed on the way out of your home. Eventually, when it becomes brighter and the water subsides, you go down and see your village is absolutely destroyed. It looks like a bomb exploded there and every single thing is destroyed. That disbelief lasts months and years.

That is what happened in July 2021 in the Ahr Valley in Germany, where my husband's family has lived for generations. Four years later, the buildings, bridges and train services are still being rebuilt. The horror of that night not only left a scar on the landscape but also scarred every single person who lives there or has visited there, including my husband, children and all my German relatives. That is what the future looks like if we do not mitigate climate change; if we do not, as my colleagues outlined, look at rivers and do the things that need to be done.

Dublin South-Central has a history of flooding by the Camac and Poddle rivers. While those rivers are not huge in comparison with other rivers in this country, their flooding causes damage. The River Poddle flood alleviation scheme includes plans for underground storage tanks, channel upgrades, flood defences and so on. Dublin City Council and South Dublin County Council are working collaboratively on those measures, which is really welcome.

This relates to my constituency. I am sure everybody here has their own experience of what it needs to do. We really need to learn from other countries. It has taken Germany, a country renowned for being organised, technical and practical, four years to ensure that businesses are back up to scratch and got the full amount of funding and bridges are being rebuilt. If we are not pre-emptive, prepared and proactive, we face that here with the devastation it brings to communities. This will last generations. They have never seen anything like this in Germany before and that is what we face here. I am giving a deeply personal experience because it has lasted. When we arrived two weeks later, the place was devastated. We were there at Christmas and it was still devastated. This is four years on in a country like Germany. That is what we face if we are not proactive.

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