Storm Chandra: Statements Seanad Éireann — 2026-02-10 ============================================================ Joe Conway (IND), Cultural and Educational Panel Cuirim fáilte roimh an Aire. I wish to raise a number of issues related to the recent weather problems that we had, particularly in the south east. The Minister has already adverted to that and God knows, the people of Wexford have been well scourged with the weather events of late. In Waterford we also had some notable difficulties. I was out in the community last Sunday morning meeting with the Minister of State, Deputy Moran, who visited. It was very good of him to come down. He spent his time on the road over last Friday, Saturday and Sunday going around to afflicted areas. It was as much a morale-boosting exercise as a delineation of the plan of action that he hopes to effect. I was encouraged by what he said. The tenor of what he said was that money is not a big problem at this stage. Funding has been promised and is there to be used. For people in distress after suffering flood damage, that is a very good message to hear. Obviously, the solutions do not come quickly enough. Most of us in this room are fortunate enough to be householders but any householder who has had water coming up through the floor or down through the ceiling knows, as per the truism, that water in the wrong place is an absolute persecution. It is a nightmare when that is writ large in a town or a village, as it was in Passage East when the brook overtopped at around 2.30 a.m., coinciding with high tide. People found themselves out on the street and the place flooded very badly. This is a very settled coastal community with a lot of old people living on Post Office Square and in Brookside. The venting and slushing waters came down the hill from the brook, overtopping and running down into the streets. I was there on Sunday morning and I saw skips full of detritus, including mattresses, suites of furniture and so on. I saw older people out talking to the Minister of State, Deputy Moran. They were near to tears and were trying to extract a promise from him that he really could not give. He cannot wave a magic wand over these things and correct them straightaway. It is a longish process. Water has to dry out and all of those things. I will not rattle on here unduly, telling the local authorities how they should do their job. As the expression goes, I would not be one to tell a grandmother how to suck eggs. The local authorities have been doing this work le fada an lá and by and large, they do it very well. After autumn there is a lot of leaf litter around. Maybe, as Senator O'Flaherty said, there were errors made in terms of not cleaning gullies and so on but I do not want to concentrate on that. As far as I can see from a layman's standpoint, all of the agencies are trying to work together with the Minister and the Minister of State, Deputy Moran. The latter's background is in the Shannon floodplains and Senator Flaherty and myself, who come from that neck of the woods, know what Shannon flooding is like and the desecration it causes. The Minister of State, Deputy Moran, more than most, will know what is involved in addressing these issues and I wish him well. When I was a child growing up, we had the weather forecast which was a very generic, broad sweep of the pen. The forecast would tell us that there will be showers down along the west coast, winds will be picking up on the Irish Sea and the temperatures will be X. It was a fairly bland thing. Now we have access to a much more exact prediction of the weather on our phones. Met Éireann does a damn good job in forecasting the weather. In our county it is normally west Waterford that gets the flooding, overtopping and bad problems with estuaries but this time, it was the east of the county. In fact, it was the entire eastern coastline, which is not famed for getting rainfall at all. It just shows the unpredictability of these unprecedented weather events. When I was the principal of a small school in Waterford I used to say, in relation to staff, that everybody likes to be told when they are doing a good job. The work that Met Éireann does in preparing us for significant and unprecedented weather events should be endorsed and staff there should be told that they are doing a good job, by and large. I do not think there is much to be gained by the Minister throwing them under the bus at a time like that. Their work should be endorsed and we should thank them in the same way that we thank him and his Department for the enlightened and very proactive way they are addressing the threats that are coming down the line. We have things to learn from this. There is an old Irish expression with which I am sure many Members are familiar - Ní hé lá na gaoithe lá na scolb. It goes back to the time of thatching. For those who are not overly versed in the Gaeilge, it means the windy day is not the day for thatching. It is all about preparedness and trying to get our sense of preparedness up to the best we can be. None of us are ever going to be perfectly able to address these unprecedented weather events. There is going to be flooding and grief coming down the line but if we work together co-operatively, realise what our strengths are and encourage one another to respond to these events then we are far more likely to address them in a satisfactory and provident way. --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2026-02-10/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:36+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-02-10