Aideen Hayden (Labour) | Oireachtas source

Over the weekend, I was watching the ongoing reports on what was happening at the Paris climate change conference. The moment the green hammer came down - I think it was at 6.07 p.m. - to say that 196 of the world's nations had reached an agreement on how to regulate climate change was incredible. It has been hailed as one of the greatest diplomatic successes of this century and, indeed, the last, particularly after the Copenhagen talks collapsed in bitterness and disarray. At the end of the day, the answer to what we are seeing in terms of the Shannon and all the other issues, such as flooding, rising sea levels, heatwaves and so forth, lies in international co-operation.

I would also like to raise two points about what is happening, particularly in the Shannon. It is appalling to see people's homes and their lands being flooded. I took the train back from Galway the weekend before last and the level of flooding was unbelievable. It was shocking. There are impacts on people's farmland and animals as well, not just on people's homes. The first issue is that for too long we have allowed people to build on floodplains, and that is clearly something that has to stop. Second, even where successive governments have taken measures to tackle flooding, in the Dargle area in Dublin, for example, people in those homes still cannot get insurance. There is no obligation on insurance companies to take into account any of the flood defence mechanisms that have been put in place. I have done some investigation into this with Dublin City Council, which confirmed what I had been told by residents: they cannot get insurance, despite the fact that millions of State money has been spent on putting in place very effective flood defences.

There is a need to have some type of State-backed insurance policy for people who have been the victims of flooding. This is the situation in many other countries, but in Ireland, the insurance industry is purely commercial. The bottom line is that people whose homes have been flooded even once have a duty to declare it and may never get insured. That is an appalling situation, and one that needs to be addressed.