Gabrielle McFadden (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State to the House and thank him for coming here. He is always quite obliging when asked to come here and we appreciate that. He and the Office of Public Works, OPW, have been working very hard to address the flooding issue and we acknowledge that. I welcome the €1 billion allocation he mentioned in his contribution. I apologise for not being here for it but I was late in getting here.

In 2015, the then Minister of State, Deputy Simon Harris, allocated €430 million to the flood relief area and it is great for that investment to be more than doubled with the allocation now of €1 billion. It is an acknowledgment that flooding is a massively serious issue. It is not merely a parochial issue. We have helped out in our own area with sandbagging and doing all sorts of work. One gets a feel for the impact flooding has when one has worked at local level to alleviate it. It is not only towns like Athlone or towns in County Mayo that suffer from it, it affects many towns around the country.

The river will do what it will do and water will always find its course. Nothing can stop that. If there were no towns or roads to disturb things, the water would flow down the natural channel and that channel would be the size it needed to be to accommodate the water. Alas, that is not the way we live. Many planning decisions were made down through the years that might not necessarily have been the right ones.

Nobody knows the river better than the people who live alongside it, be they people in towns like Athlone or farmers in places like Carrick O'Brien or Golden Island. Everybody who lives there knows the river. I have raised with the Minister of State in this House and with the previous Minister of State, Deputy Harris, the carrying out of small remedial works that people have suggested. What is the position regarding the lowering of the level of Lough Ree? The Minister of State will know that the level in Lough Ree was raised in 1979 for navigation purposes. People have questioned that. I am not an engineer and I do not know if lowering the level would be of benefit. Has it been assessed as to whether lowering the level would be of any assistance down the line? When the former Deputy Brian Hayes was Minister of State half the cut at Meelick was cleared but the other half was not because of various licensing issues. Farmers living along the shores of the river would say that if small works like that were addressed, perhaps it would alleviate some of the flooding.