Brian Hayes (Dublin South West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

-----who did a fine job in the Department. One of the great advantages of having the CFRAM process, which is long, tortuous and takes five years between the draft, the preliminary, the agreement and the lodging of plans, is that for the first time, we will have some national standard when it comes to the provision of flood maps. That will have a huge impact in terms of future development and planning in this country.

I recently met a county manager who said to me that if we knew then what we know now in terms of the predictability of flooding events in catchment areas, some of the craziest decisions in the world which were taken in the past 15 to 20 years would not have been taken. We will now have a standard whereby we can all say that this is our best guess and estimate in terms of the predictability of flooding events and which we can stand over. That will be hugely significant in terms of resources.

It might well be the case that in some parts of the country, it would be cheaper to relocate people than make a huge multi-million euro investment. That happened along some parts of the River Shannon in the 1920s and 1930s when people were moved to higher ground. Those lands were given to new farmers who now claim there is a solution to this.

I am not a climate change denier but I am here to talk about flood alleviation measures. This is an historic problem. I think Senator Landy made the point that many parts of the country have a historic problem of flooding with or without climate change. I think we are calling it climate change now but it is just low lying parts of the country. When one has this problem of huge fluvial events, which are becoming more regular and, I hasten to add, particular, where perhaps there is three months rainfall in three hours in one part of the country is added to a tidal event - if the tide is in the wrong direction - and wind, to which Senator Clune referred, one will have a major problem. It is the case that we are seeing more fluvial difficulties emerging around the country and we need to be conscious of that.

I assure colleagues that under the EU directive which we signed up to, we recognise climate change scenarios are taken into account in our computation. The analysis of climate change is a matter for Met Éireann and the OPW's flood risk analysis is informed by Met Éireann's climate reviews. Whatever about climate change, this is a historic problem which we are dealing with and which has become more acute in recent years. A bit like the French Revolution, it is too early to say whether it is all down to climate change. However, there is certainly an issue-----