Pauline O'Reilly (Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State. I commend Senator Garvey on the work that she has put into this motion, and we are all fully behind her on the details of it. I echo many of my colleagues' comments.

I want to talk a little bit about adaptation because there is a reality here. We could talk about mitigation, which is very important and where we need to put a lot of funding, but we also need to address the fact that flooding is now a reality for Ireland. The IPCC report for the first time looked at a regional breakdown. It is showing that northern Europe, and Ireland in particular, are going to see more flooding and more rainfall. For Ireland we are talking about hard storms rather than the soft rain that we are all used to. This is going to become a reality for us. I live in Galway where we can see it already. The Irish Centre for High-End Computing has said that we are going to see ongoing flooding around the hospital in Galway.

We need to look at a couple of things. Absolutely, we need to look at some of the hard infrastructure for cities and to protect homes, but fundamentally there has been a lack of investment when it comes to nature-based solutions for flooding. What happens upland affects us on the coast also.

All of the measures referred to by the previous speakers are key to this but we also must look at planning. We have to stop giving planning permission for housing and particularly for things like hospitals and schools along our coastline. Some towns will, over time, have to look at changing and migrating higher upland. Consider Barna in particular. It possibly needs to be 10 m to 15 m higher than where it is now, which is shocking to hear. It does not mean that we do not use our coastal roads, but it means that we look at changes of use, tourism and leisure along coastal routes, which can be closed for some days at a time such as greenways and blueways. That is part of the solution but it can also be quite positive because we are bringing tourism to the parts of the country that are going to be most deeply impacted. Some of those places that will be most deeply impacted will be Galway, Clare and Limerick, and places on the east coast such as Dublin and Louth. We have seen some of the impacts already on places like Howth for instance.

I am aware of the amount of work the Minister of State, Deputy O'Donovan, is putting into this, and all of the reports that are ongoing. If we look across the developing world we can see some of the future that lies ahead of us. Ireland has a temperate climate and we have been somewhat complacent, but climate change is knocking on our door, it has opened the door and it is here now for us in this country as well.

We need to step up when it comes to climate finance for developing countries but we also need to look at adaptation within Ireland and for our own communities. Some 70,000 homes in Galway are at risk of flooding by 2050. We need to protect those people but we also need to stop building in places we know are at risk, because there is only so much that we can do. I thank Senator Garvey for all the work that she has done.