Jim Walsh (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Cuirim fáilte roimh Bean Uí Wahlström go dtí an Teach. I welcome Ms Wahlström who has a very good track record in this area given her 30 years of experience. I thank her for sharing her expertise and experience with us. I also compliment her on the fact she was appointed by the Secretary General of the UN in 2008 as the first special representative of the UN in this area of disaster risk.

Over many decades, this House has had debates on disasters, in particular in Africa in which Ms Wahlström has taken a keen interest, and on all sorts of humanitarian challenges which face the international community, in particular African countries. It is good we have moved from a situation where we tended to give food to get over the immediate crisis to one where more sustainable issues are addressed and where development going forward will be sustainable. Economic progress in Africa in recent years has been quite impressive. The old adage that if one gives a man a fish, one feeds him for one today but if one teaches him to fish, one feeds him for life is coming through.

I welcome the recent negotiations on the arms trade treaty at the UN. I hope many countries will subscribe to it because many conflicts and disasters are caused by indiscriminate and illegal arms trading, often done for selfish reasons by countries and inflicting much hardship and torment on very vulnerable and very poor people in many of these countries.

I was surprised to hear of the impact on GDP of the disaster in Christchurch, New Zealand. I visited New Zealand a few years ago with my wife and we spent some time in the beautiful city of Christchurch. It was horrendous to hear what happened but I was unaware that one disaster resulted in a 20% reduction in GDP across New Zealand. It really brings home the economic impact of these disasters. As Ms Wahlström rightly pointed out, increasingly these will have serious impacts on the global economy. I do not think Ms Wahlström mentioned it but the tsunami off the coast of Japan which led to the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear power plant certainly had reverberations across the global economic field not only in Japan but elsewhere. I am sure it will have a considerable national and regional affect for decades to come.

There is now an acknowledgement that efforts to reduce disaster risks must be systematically integrated into politics, plans and programmes for sustainable development and poverty reduction.

We have a saying that prevention is better than cure so I welcome the comments of my colleague, Senator Mullen, who emphasised the early warning mechanisms using modern technology for evacuation procedures etc.

Some three or four years ago, I did a course on crisis management and we looked at 9/11 in New York and the hurricane in the Mississippi. Part of the study brought us into individual areas like fires and aeroplane crashes. From all the case studies, it is extraordinary that people who had planned how to deal with such an eventuality stood a much better prospect of surviving disasters than those who had not planned. I subsequently paid close attention to the safety announcements at the start of the flight by air hostesses on a flight I was on. I must have been the only boy in class paying attention because, when she came around with the drinks afterwards, she gave me a free gin and tonic for having paid attention. Most people do not pay attention and, as a consequence, they do not react quickly enough. If one is prepared when a disaster happens, immediately one's mind kicks into action and one will take the planned decision. Without going through that, one's chances of survival are much less.

Ms Wahlström mentioned the Hyogo framework on disaster reduction, which has five main areas. Perhaps these can be specified in the reply. More than 2.7 billion people were affected and €1.3 billion people were lost through international disasters between 2000 and 2011. These are astronomical figures that I did not fully appreciate. Risk assessment is a critical part of this. A number of years ago, I saw a programme that received little amplification in the media or elsewhere. It was a Channel 4 documentary on the Canary Islands and the fact the islands' mountains lay on a fault line. The programme talked about the possibility of the fault line causing a landslide to the sea and how this would have disastrous consequences for Europe and wipe out almost all of the east coast of the United States. I have not seen anything about it since but I wonder if it figures in the UN assessment. Fail to prepare, prepare to fail.