Gareth Scahill (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The Minister of State is very welcome. It is great to have the opportunity to have this conversation. I will not go on about what happened during the storm. If anybody is looking for an insight or to get a snapshot of what it was like in my constituency of Roscommon-Galway, an article by the editor of the Roscommon Herald stated, "as [Storm] Éowyn swept in ... [I] prayed that the roof would remain on the house." I encourage people to look it up just to get an idea of the storm.

In responding to Storm Éowyn, I would like to talk about moving forward and what we can do to be ready the next time. The emergency response and its communication is something that we need to work on for future storms. It was a situation where local councillors and TDs throughout the country dropped everything and reacted and responded to the needs of their constituents to provide updates on restoration and available supports by any means available to them. We need to ensure a better mechanism is available in future to support these public representatives to provide that support. Some of my colleagues mentioned there was a different interpretation of what the supports were in different constituencies. We need to standardise that and ensure that the public representatives on the ground have access to that.

We need to now start the process of supporting the communities and clubs that opened up their facilities as community hubs to ensure that all the facilities needed to step in the next time are there. We need to provide the supports for those communities. We also need to look at areas that did not have community hubs and ensure that they have the facilities for whatever comes next. We need to provide similar mechanisms for childcare facilities and schools. A crèche in Frenchpark had its power out for two weeks after the storm, which had a knock-in effect on parents, working families and the mechanisms they use to get to work and look after their kids at the same time.

The mechanism for accessing hot food needs to be simplified and standardised throughout the country. There were situations where households at the periphery of the county where I live had to travel 20 or 30 minutes to access hot food, when similar was available within five minutes of their homes but across the county lines. We need to standardise that process so that all the local authorities are working off the same hymn sheet. We need to support our farmers, especially those who are currently repairing outbuildings and sheds where roofs and structures have been damaged. Many of these sheds in rural Ireland cannot be insured because of their age and now remain unstable and require full reroofing. A simple mechanism for this could be the inclusion of storm-related provisions in the TAMS programme. On the same basis, I would like something to provide funding for generators, or an alternative mechanism, for water pumps for livestock. That was a major issue for farmers throughout the country, which was not highlighted very much throughout the storm response. I received numerous calls on it. Farmers were genuinely worried about the well-being of their livestock.

I will submit a Commencement matter shortly regarding the senior alert scheme calling for standard SIM cards in the alarms that are provided, specifically, the use of multinetwork SIM cards attached to the strongest mobile phone network. This significantly reduces the possibility of a call failing to reach the monitoring centre in the event of a network outage or because of poor coverage. If one network is down, the SIM card automatically switches to the strongest alternative network.

The ESB was brilliant in its response, but maybe the communication was not as up to date as it could have been. The ESB brought teams in from across Europe to restore power. I was told of certain parts of County Roscommon that came off the ESB generators only last night, when they were reconnected to the grid a full month after the power had originally gone. We still have a situation in rural Ireland with regard to broadband a full month on, where large communities have no access to communications or broadband at present. These are townlands outside Ballinlough, where I am from, including Carrick, Laughil, Cloonakille, Grange Cross, Cloonalough and Falledeen. We are talking about a couple of hundred households that are still without broadband. In some cases, trees are still lying across the lines and there is no sign of that situation changing a full month after the storm.

Is there any way we can get an update on the humanitarian fund and what percentage of applications have been processed? What percentage are still awaiting processing? A couple of my colleagues have mentioned providing information, but it would be great if there were a central hub during emergencies or storms for information, accessing support mechanisms and an explanation of them. This would be a central place where people could find this information rather than us all scrambling around looking for it.