Paul Daly (Fianna Fail)

I second the proposed Bill. I compliment Senator Rabbitte who, as she very eloquently described, lives so close to the River Shannon herself. Not taking from her explanations, I lived in Kilbeggan, which is a long way from the River Shannon, but I am on the banks of one of its tributary rivers. The Inny, the Suck and the Brosna are the three main tributaries of the River Shannon. I live very close to the River Brosna and what happens on the Shannon affects us that far up. The Minister of State will be well aware of the different attempts made to alleviate and handle the flooding of the River Shannon. One of the biggest moves at Government level was the introduction of the catchment flood risk assessment and management, CFRAM, programme and the CFRAM flood risk maps that were drawn and, I think, are updated every six years. A constituent and close neighbour of mine contacted me regarding the fact that when he went to reinsure his house, his insurance company was refusing to insure him because he had appeared on one of these famous CFRAM flood risk maps.

I raised the issue here at the time on the Order of Business to seek a discussion with the Minister on it. As I said at the time and I will repeat again, if that man’s house ever floods, we will all need to be in a Noah’s Ark. Unfortunately, however, because he was inside a line on a map, a map that has been drawn based on the current status of the River Shannon, just to be sure to be sure, he was unable to get insurance for his house. This is how important the management of the River Shannon is, and not just to the people who live in its environment, on its banks or close to its estuary.

As I said, I second the Bill. I accept and promote its bona fides. Common sense would tell us it is 2025 and we are talking about something from 1925. We are talking about legislation introduced in 1934, I think it was, and it needs to be reviewed if nothing else. It needs to be looked at with a microscope to see how it can improve what is happening on the Shannon. In my role as spokesperson on agriculture, I was actively involved with Senator Rabbitte and others in getting compensation in 2023 for the farmers who lost their fodder in the Shannon Callows. It is not just the Shannon Callows. Right back up our way today there are fields flooded. It is wintertime and most of the livestock in the sheds, but an unintended consequence of what happens when a field as far up as County Westmeath is flooded, let it be only overnight, is that the nitrates go back with the water when the levels subside. It is having unintended consequences at many levels.

As I said, the legislation is from the 1930s. Let us imagine the Ireland of the 1930s and then the Ireland of today, with all the new infrastructure, housing, roads, concrete yards, etc., that have been built. In other words, these are water catchment and storm water releases that are feeding into the streams that flow into the tributaries of the River Shannon. It is half the country that is being affected by this. It is a completely changed landscape that is catching the rainwater and it is a completely changed volume of rainwater falling because of the climate change we all have to accept is causing such a difference to our climate and environment. In discussions with some older people, my father included, the Lord be good to him, a few years ago, one elderly gentleman asked when was the last time we had what we call a soft day. It seems there is a torrential downpour now or it is not raining at all. There is no such thing anymore as what was always known as a soft day with a bit of drizzly rain.

Things have changed. The volume of water falling has changed. The basin we are catching the water in has changed. The amount of water and when it is falling has changed. We have not, however, changed the legislation implemented for the purposes of the production of hydroelectricity in the 1930s. With that in mind, I commend the Bill, compliment my colleague Senator Rabbitte, who did the vast majority of the work on it, and hope the Bill cannot just pass today but work its way through the Houses and make a difference. We need some joined-up thinking when it comes to the management of the River Shannon. A range of different organisations and outfits are responsible in different ways for it and, between the cracks of all of them, nobody is ultimately responsible at the end of the day when the Shannon floods. We are then pumping billions of euro and an unbelievable amount of time into flood defences. In other words, we are firefighting as opposed to trying to eliminate the possibilities of the fire starting.