Anne Rabbitte (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

My colleague who is over there, Senator Noonan, happens to agree with me and we have spoken about it.

This is a debate I called for, along with many other Senators. It was great to have the senior Minister earlier and I welcomed his contribution, especially where he said there will be much to learn from. He said we are fully out of the response stage in respect of it and that the strategic management framework overseen by the Office of Emergency Planning in the Department of Defence will be reviewed through the Government task force on emergency planning.That is very welcome because a lot of key findings will come out of this. One of those findings will be that people suffered. There is no denying that whatsoever. However, our council staff and full-time emergency staff really stepped up, including all across Uisce Éireann, the ESB and many more, as did our volunteers and community response. It was phenomenal.

I come from County Galway, which is quite big. It is like County Cork. We are the second biggest county in the country. We have a real dynamic. I live on the banks of the River Shannon at Portumna, but the Atlantic borders the other part of my constituency, believe it or not. We were blessed with this particular storm in that it happened at night, at high tide, and because of its wind direction. If there had been the merry mix where there could have been that high tide and a slightly different wind direction, Galway city, Kinvara and all the way in would have got coastal flooding. There is no doubt about that. Where I live on the banks of the Shannon, we are always prone to flooding from excessive rain and everything else.

We need to look at what the emergency response is from our local authorities and whether it is co-ordinated at a local level. The Minister of State will find it hard to believe that retained firemen in Galway County Council cannot use a chainsaw. When there was an extreme weather event, like the one we have just experienced, we relied on volunteers and farmers. We relied on people to take the authority into their own hands to go and cut trees. I have no doubt they had no qualms about using their chainsaws but at the same time, there has to be an approach to that. There is a risk element in that farmers were putting their own lives at risk. They have not been trained in how to check for all the wires and everything else, although they did a fantastic job and cleared the roads. I know from talking to Senator Goldsboro that a chainsaw licence can be used in County Tipperary. We need a standardisation of approach.

That is just how the retained firefighters respond to an emergency. How they are called up to respond to an emergency needs to happen. This is especially the case where there is a city and county council dynamic, as there is in Galway, and that co-ordination between the two CEOs. They are two fantastic gentlemen doing a great job but it is about how the city and county respond to an emergency. That needs to be standardised. One of the stories I have, which I will share very quickly, was when a 999 call went in for the ambulance service to attend to get somebody from their home because of an emergency. That person had to wait one and a half hours for somebody who was trained to come to cut the tree to get the ambulance in. That is not good enough. A colleague of mine, Joe Sheridan from Dunmore, said that people had generators in the early 1900s. His area was the first where the lights went out and the last where they came on - they did not come back until 10 February. To be honest, they went from standing up a community response to getting to neighbouring areas, where they really identified the issues around social isolation and not having a very good, informed list of who was where.

There is also the issue of the food response. We need to look at our day services and how we ensure that our pharmacies, GPs and day centres all have that generated response. If they cannot send emails or process the emergency medicines that people rely on a daily basis, we have to look at that element within the community.

Forestry right across Galway is decimated, from Portumna to Derrycrag at Woodford and from Coole Park at Gort down to Monivea in north Galway. Our forestry system has been flattened.