Climate Action Plan
Dail Éireann — 2026-02-17
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Richard Boyd Barrett (PBP), Dún Laoghaire

In August of last year, I was out ill at the time, but Deputy Murphy raised on my behalf and our area's behalf the issue of gorse fires in Cherrywood. As the Taoiseach knows, Cherrywood is the biggest residential development the country. I did not realise, to be honest, that gorse is very dangerous when it is burned. It is very toxic. These fires went on, basically, for several weeks. The residents are saying that, really, there was no proper planning or co-ordination between different State agencies in terms of responding to this. The fires continued. People were passing the parcel between the HSE, the council, fire services and so on as to who was actually responsible. Meanwhile, these dangerous toxic pollutants were going into people's homes. The monitoring of them was completely inadequate because it was not incident-specific. The monitoring stations were far away where they would not be able to capture the damage that was being done from the fires. The report shows significant negative health impacts. What people really want to know is that the Government is going to take it seriously, that there is a proper emergency response plan and that there is co-ordination between different Government agencies in assessing the health risk and, indeed, being able to respond to these emergencies.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-02-17/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:38+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-02-17