Anne Rabbitte (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I congratulate Senator Kyne on his role as Leader and I look forward to working with him during his term. I, too, want to discuss Storm Éowyn. In County Galway, where I come from, not only was the impact felt while the storm was going through the county, but it lasted until last Monday when the last person in Galway, in Dunmore, had their electricity reconnected. That is far too long to wait. We have to reflect and learn from this. Learning is great but we have to operationalise that learning. That does not fall to one Department or one Minister. It falls to many of them. It falls to the responsibility of local government, social protection, communications and health. While there was co-ordination, it also exposed how vulnerable and weak we can be within our communities. What were really vulnerable were our daycare centres for older persons and those with additional needs. Our health hubs and primary care centres, pharmacies and GPs were also vulnerable and left exposed. Something else that was exposed was our lack of community centres. Loughrea does not have a community centre. Kinvara has a small community centre but it did not have PE hall that could have been used. We saw in Dunmore that if they had had the kVA generator they had in 1937, they would have been further on than they were in 2025. Ten miles up the road from where I live is Lowertown in Woodford, where people only got their electricity back last week. The storm really exposed rural isolation and people living alone. While we do have network of vulnerable adults and families, GDPR stood in the way of sharing a lot of that information. I ask the Leader to arrange for us to have a conversation in this House with whatever Minister he believes has the responsibility as to how to put the learning into operation.