Rónán Mullen (Independent) | Oireachtas source

With regard to Storm Ali, I want to extend condolences to the families of those who tragically died in the storm. Nothing can prepare one for the shock of dealing with a loss from such a seemingly random event. There have been some criticisms of the Government, perhaps unfairly, that we were somehow unprepared for Storm Ali this week. It has been reported that the Tánaiste commented that the public was not prepared, that storm fatigue might have kicked in, and that if people do not see a red warning then they fail to sit up and take sufficient notice. At first this comment might seem almost insensitive in the circumstances, but perhaps the Tánaiste has touched on an issue here which needs to be addressed somehow. It has struck me over the last year that there has been a proliferation of yellow and orange warnings issued by Met Éireann, even during what seemed to be relatively innocuous weather events. Perhaps the public has been lulled into a false sense of security when it does not see a red warning: life is expected to go on as normal and people go to work and so on.

The fact that we have seen highly competent responses to Hurricane Ophelia and Storm Emma over the last 12 months may have also led to people mentally taking the foot off the pedal. This would seem to be connected to a succession of strange weather events. The yellow-orange-red warning system has been relatively new to us in the last 18 months or so. With climate change becoming more of an issue, perhaps we need to a debate over how we are going to deal with weather events in the future. Do we need to have systems in place that do not need to be kicked in in times of emergency only? Could some further assessment be done on the current warning system to see if it can be refined or reclassified? We certainly need to have a system in place so that there be no doubt in people’s minds about the danger of a particular weather events, even at times when life must go on and we have not quite reached the threshold of being told to stay at home and batten down the hatches. Speaking of orange areas, there are no grey areas when safety is an issue. We need to look at what more we can do to ensure we all enter the mode of alertness we need if we are going to avoid unnecessary fatalities and injuries.