Storm Chandra: Statements
Seanad Éireann — 2026-02-10
============================================================

Nessa Cosgrove (LAB), Labour Panel

My heartfelt sympathies go to those whose livelihoods and businesses were affected by Storm Chandra. As Senator Murphy said, we were not affected in the north west. I grew up in Bandon and the Minister of State is from Clonakilty, so we know that flood defences actually work.
It is very welcome that the OPW is putting emergency measures in place in the area where I live, Strandhill, but unfortunately there is no sense of urgency to it. We can go around in circles saying we will put in and look at engineering solutions. I agree with my colleague about having natural water retention measures put in place. We have seen and proven they work. We are planting Sitka spruce even though we saw the devastating impacts of such plantations during Storm Éowyn. This is still happening on shallow soil. At the same time, we are talking about building LNG infrastructure even though we know this is contributing to climate change.
I am always going on about it, but a good start for us would be to look at having a moratorium on the building of data centres and LNG infrastructure, or any fossil fuel infrastructure. We should also look at fully resourcing local authorities. It has come up over and over again that local authority staff are the first people in the line of defence. I accept that work is done by voluntary and community workers, An Post, our emergency services and the Defence Forces. We need to resource local authority staff. The under-resourcing of local authorities has been raised in this House on numerous occasions. The OPW must be accountable and responsible as well. They all play a part together. We must ensure that Uisce Éireann, the ESB, the OPW and, most importantly, the local authorities, are resourced to deal with these emergencies.

---

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