Joe Conway (Independent) | Oireachtas source

The Minister of State is welcome to the Chamber.

I will give a tiny bit of historical perspective to this debate on Storm Éowyn. Looking around the Chamber, I do not think anybody else here is venerable enough to remember Hurricane Debbie in the middle of September 1961. I do. It was a ferocious storm. I remember standing in the clump in our front garden watching mature beech, oak and elm trees - we had elm trees in Ireland at that stage - being ripped and tossed out of the ground with gay abandon. There were 15 fatalities, but guess what? The hurricane occurred on a Saturday. The following Monday, even though the storm claimed 15 lives in Ireland, it only got one third of the front page of the Cork Examiner. What preoccupied the front page was the simultaneous tragedy of Jadotville - the loss of Irish troops and the great emergency there. The point I am making is that life goes on. Storms happen. I was not there in 1839, of course, but we had the Oíche na Gaoithe Móire - the Night of the Big Wind - when approximately 200 people were killed in Ireland. With Storm Éowyn, I believe we had one fatality, relating to a sleep apnoea machine that stopped working.

There is a danger when confronted by these natural disasters that we can get beset by national navel gazing and devolve into b'fhéidir go bhfuilimid ar tí do-athraithe mar chalóga sneachta or, as one of the denizens of the Lower House uses the language, "snowflakes". We can become snowflakey in these matters.

I commend all of the local authorities, one of which I was a member of until recently, for the fantastic work that they did. Storms occur where we are located in the north-east Atlantic and we get errant winds from the Gulf of Mexico or, as some would have it, the "Gulf of America". These things happen. Trying to manage them is the essence of the response but we should not have a national splurge on blaming people. Look positively on it. The local authorities, our services, including emergency services, and our forecasters performed amazingly well.

I would love it if we put a bit of perspective on this whole debate and just took it as a matter of fact. We live in an Atlantic climate, we get on with it and we live life, and we enjoy the fruits of our beautiful climate and withstand the outrages when they come.