Flood Prevention: Motion [Private Members] Dail Éireann — 2026-02-11 ============================================================ Peadar Tóibín (AON), Meath West -----empathically to families who have lost everything. That has added up to a hill of beans for those families over that period of time. I accept that the Minister of State, Deputy Moran, wants to get things done. I accept his bona fides in relation this. He has been this position for a year at this point. We have to get to the root of the problem here. The construction of flood defences is drowning in bureaucracy and red tape. Many flood defence planning applications are taking 20 to 30 years, from concept to completion. Enniscorthy, Midleton, Clontarf, Galway, Sandymount and a rake of others have been waiting ten, 20, 30 years just for the planning applications to go in. The issue is that if there is not a fix for this as soon as possible, there will be enormous damage done to those areas. The Minister of State mentioned 100 projects that are in planning currently. He also defended the role of the planning process. At the heart of the problem is that our planning system and licensing, permitting, tendering and judicial review systems are all demonstrably slower than in the vast majority of other European countries. They are all slower here. That means they are broken and not working in this situation. This is tearing at the fabric of society. Enniscorthy, which was a lake last week, has been waiting 25 years for a planning application. The M50 is a carpark every single day now because of the planning process difficulties in getting roads and infrastructure built. The national children's hospital was promised by 2020 for €700 million, save an asteroid hitting a planet, according to Leo Varadkar. It is still not open and it is costing €2.25 billion. The Minister of State has to recognise that we have a critical crisis in terms of the building of infrastructure and our planning systems. It is an enormous cost financially and in terms of the services we are not receiving. It has to be fixed soon. We have to set about dealing with the vexatious objections that come from one end of the country to the other. We have to realise that Ireland is now a judicial review hot spot in terms of higher levels of judicial reviews than practically any other country. They are taking longer. Our courts are not sufficiently staffed. If the Minister of State were to physically attack someone on this side of this House today, it would take longer for him to go through the courts in this country than in practically every other European country. The planning departments in the councils and in An Coimisiún Pleanála do not have enough staff. They have far more planners than they had before, but they still have nowhere near the number of planning staff that they need. I welcome the Minister of State's view that there is going to be zero tolerance of further development on flood plains in the future. The truth of the matter is that thousands of houses have been built in flood risk areas and flood plains, with the permission of the State and local authorities. As a result, the Government is responsible for the costs to the families when they see their homes flooded. We all saw cars floating in the past week in those floods. That is probably the second most expensive item of expenditure that those families will have in their lives, after the cost of their homes. When they ask the Government for help, it says "No” and that it is not helping with that. We need proper funds to be made available to families and businesses when their homes and businesses are flooded. That needs to happen right now. --- 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/dail/2026-02-11/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-09-14T01:01:02+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-02-11