I propose to take Questions Nos. 1 to 13, inclusive, together. The National Emergency Co-ordination Group is the central Government platform, established as part of the response to a threatened or ongoing national level emergency, under the strategic emergency management framework. All Government Departments, local authorities, emergency services and agencies are represented on the NECG. The Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage, which is the relevant lead Department under the strategic emergency management framework, activated the NECG when it became clear that Storm Éowyn would be a severe weather event. The first meeting of the NECG was held on Wednesday, 22 January, and the NEC continued to meet daily up to and including Monday, 10 February. The Department of the Taoiseach was represented at all meetings of the NECG and its related subgroups over the period 22 January to 10 February. During this time I was briefed on the work of the NECG daily by senior officials and advisers in the Department of An Taoiseach. I also received personally a number of briefings from the chair of the NECG. I also had briefings with the Ministers, Deputies Browne, Calleary and O'Brien, and senior officials from their respective Departments regarding the co-ordinated response being overseen by the NECG, the humanitarian assistance scheme operated by the Department of Social Protection and the progress being made by energy, water and communications utilities in restoring services. Further, since the standing down of the NECG and its various subgroups, I have met with the relevant Ministers, officials, including the chair of the NECG, and State agencies to discuss responsiveness and lessons learned with the aim of improving our resilience and informing future preparedness for severe weather events.
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Are we eating into the time for the next questions?
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Deputies have asked a lot of questions. I welcome them all. To reply to Deputy Dolan on the review and the response, there will be a review. At the most recent meeting of the Government task force on emergency planning on 11 March, it was agreed that a review of the response to Storm Éowyn would be submitted to Government by the summer. That will be led by the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage and will identify recommendations regarding the response at the national and local levels, reducing severe weather impacts on critical infrastructure and essential services, assisting communities and individuals severely affected by emergencies, key policy issues and cross-cutting responsibilities. I will make a point in terms of the role of NECG in particular. Storm Éowyn was named by the UK Met Office on Tuesday, 21 January. It was the fifth named storm of the 2024-25 windstorm season. It was set to track to the north west of Ireland, producing strong south-easterly winds that would then veer west to south-westerly and intensify through the morning of Friday, 24 January. NECG met well in advance of the storm. I will make one overall point to everybody: do not underestimate the importance of the warning. That red warning saved a lot of lives. Of that, there is no doubt. Unfortunately, one person lost his life. This has been examined. I had meetings with everybody after the storm. There is an issue with transitioning too quickly from a red to an orange warning. An orange warning enables people to move about the place but the damage during the red period can impact or manifest itself during the orange period. People may be returning to work when a tree comes down, for example. We have to examine that again. We also have to re-examine warnings and directions to schools. I have ordered a full and comprehensive review of all of this. Deputies Scanlon and Martin Daly and others talked about communications networks. There is an onus on the companies to do better in that regard. Deputy Brendan Smith spoke about the need for tree corridors. That has been the most frustrating discussion I have had so far. The Minister for agriculture and I met the Department of agriculture and others. We need to improve the resilience of the grid. That means proper tree corridors. We need to engage with Coillte, private farm owners, private forestry owners, the ESB and EirGrid. Once and for all, we need a comprehensive programme to protect the grid from falling trees. It seems elementary. The issue is the lack of a single focus. Different people all say it is somebody else's problem. I am keeping a focus on this. I want to make sure that progress is made before the next winter with regard to the necessity for tree corridors. One interesting positive outcome of the storm, if one can even say that, is the degree to which communities rallied. There is very strong community resilience in Ireland. We now need to institutionalise that a bit more. By that, I mean that we need to resource communities. Deputy Martin Daly referenced my visit to Ballaghaderreen. There was a tremendous community focal point there. There was tremendous co-ordination and all of the various schemes were used, from the rural social scheme to the solidarity grant payment scheme. The rural social scheme was used to purchase vans to get food to people living in remote areas. GAA clubs, soccer clubs, rugby clubs and so on need to be provided with generators. This needs to be done by way of a programme, as they cannot be provided to everybody but they can be provided where there are identifiable focal points in a given community. Some did not have generators. If, by the grace of God, such a focal point got power back quickly, it could then make the facility available to the public. We need to develop a support scheme, probably through the Department of Rural and Community Development, that enables us to strategically put in place essential provisions for communities, enabling there to be focal hubs to which people could come to shower, to charge phones, to contact people and so on. I am very keen to see that developed. The Defence Forces are brought in by the civil authority. They can only come in if they are asked by the local authorities. Local authorities lead on the ground. Under the national emergency plan and planning structure, every county has to have an emergency plan formulated and published. We tend to get different responses from different local authorities. We have to work to make that more uniform in the future. The ambulance network is an ongoing issue and not just in the context of the storm. I will talk to the Minister for Health in that respect. I was at the recent launch of the helicopter emergency service in the south. Significant progress has been made. I am aware there are staffing issues but I hope negotiations can resolve that. We have moved from a monocultural form of forestry.
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More recent plans are much more towards broadleaf trees and a proper mixture. We need commercial forestry as well. Deputy Murphy called it for-profit forestry. We need timber. Timber-frame housing is more climate friendly than cement. We need a better balance. We cannot just ridicule forestry for profit. We need a commercial forestry sector. We also need greater biodiversity and varied plantations of trees. I am very keen on that. A comprehensive scheme was announced last year and significant grants are available to farmers in particular. The traditional main commodities are dairy, beef and the rest. It is not as easy to move people over to forestry but that work will continue. I have exhausted as much as I can.
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I propose to take Questions Nos. 14 to 24, inclusive, together. The programme for Government, Securing Ireland's Future, sets out a number of commitments relating to our national security and defence. The programme acknowledges that we live in a time of geopolitical upheaval and challenges to democracy and the international rules-based order with threats and challenges arising from a dynamic global geopolitical landscape. In this context, the Government will implement a number of measures relating to defence, justice and cybersecurity and improved co-ordination of national security. I recently approved the establishment of a ministerial national security council, which will comprise the Taoiseach as chair, the Tánaiste and the Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade, Defence and Justice. The council will review strategic national security developments, review progress with delivery of the Government's national security commitments and measures and consider reports on the security situation and security threat levels and any other matters of importance to our national security. The council will meet regularly. Its meetings will be attended by the Secretaries General of the relevant Departments, the Commissioner for An Garda Síochána, the Chief of Staff of the Defence Forces, the director of the National Cyber Security Centre and the chiefs of staff of the Taoiseach and Tánaiste. The current national security committee of officials will remain in place and report to the ministerial national security council for each of its meetings. In addition to its current responsibilities, the national security committee will steer and oversee progress with the delivery of the Government's strategic national security commitment and will report on progress to the ministerial national security council. To support the work of the council and the committee, a new national security secretariat will be established in my Department, which will provide reporting from meetings of the national security committee and the ministerial national security council. The new secretariat will also convene a number of new working groups of the national security committee to bring focused attention to bear on the delivery of actions in the primary areas of national security concern and to identify other matters requiring consideration by the ministerial national security council. The administrative arrangements to give effect to these commitments are currently being carried out.
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I thank all the Deputies who raised the issue. I will make the fundamental point that the establishment of the national security council is about creating a proper structure to ensure democratic accountability on national security matters, and proper co-ordination between all Departments and between An Garda Síochána and the Defence Forces. As Taoiseach, I will chair it, and also participating will be the Ministers for Justice and Foreign Affairs and Trade. The council will operate at a high level in terms of the national security threats that face the country. Confidentiality is very important in terms of the conduct of national security threats and how we respond. In time, I would like to see some discussion with the Oireachtas in terms of an Oireachtas role, but it would have to be predicated on confidentiality in terms of our engagement with An Garda Síochána and the Defence Forces. We do not have a tradition of that in our political system. We must consider the nature of modern threats. It is not project fear, as Deputy Boyd Barrett said. Russia did invade Ukraine, by the way; that is just a fact. It is not project fear; it happened. That act alone has changed the entire mindset around Europe in respect of security, allied to the decision of the US to make it very clear that its role is changing in terms of being the ultimate security guarantor of the western hemisphere. Therefore, Europe has to seriously look at how exposed it is to any future aggression. Whether or not the Deputy and others like it, the reality is that there are EU member states that see the situation as existential. These are states that formerly experienced the brutality and repression of the Soviet empire. I am speaking of Poland, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia. They do not want ever again to be under the rule of a jackbooted regime that suppresses civil rights, civil expression and political expression, and where, if people speak out, they are put into a jail straight away. They do not want that. It is not project fear. That is a bit too simplistic in terms of what is going on. In some respects, we are seeing a growth in autocracy across the world, with similar methodologies and similar approaches to international relations. We have to protect our own democratic structures, as Deputy Pádraig O'Sullivan said, and the Electoral Commission is working on that. As Deputy Shane Moynihan said, we also must protect our economic infrastructure and our energy infrastructure. Modern methods of disruption mean warfare does not have to be waged conventionally. It can be done through cyber means to devastating effects, as we found out following the attack on our health service during the Covid-19 period. That was devastating. On the maritime front, which was raised by Deputy Malcolm Byrne, the subsea cables and energy interconnectors are very important. The decision regarding a national gas reserve is a security decision - an energy security decision - whereby if anything happens to our interconnectors, we need backup to keep the Irish economy going and, basically, to keep the lights on in households and in industry. It is an expensive thing to have to do but we must do it. It would be irresponsible to take a chance in respect of that. Regarding the Mothers Against Genocide protest, there is absolutely no issue with protests - none whatsoever. I am informed that there was engagement with a number of protesters who were blocking the entrance to Leinster House. Why does that have to happen? People can protest on the left-hand side, the right-hand side or across the road.
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They do not have to protest at all. We had protests a year or two ago that were quite violent.
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I am not saying the Mothers Against Genocide protesters were doing that; they were not. However, everybody in this House railed against the Garda for not having operational procedures to ensure access to, and egress from, Leinster House.
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I did not interrupt the Deputies. Protesters do not have to block the gates of Leinster House.
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What happened then was the Garda gave a direction under the Criminal Justice (Public Order) Act. That is what the Garda formally did. There was no physical engagement; gardaí just gave a direction. I am informed that the individuals were given a period of time to adhere to the direction. That direction was not complied with and 11 people were then arrested for offences contrary to section 8 of the Criminal Justice (Public Order) Act. All 11 of them have received adult cautions. Additionally, three people were arrested for alleged offences under section 6, dealing with threatening, abusive or insulting behaviour in a public place, section 9, wilful obstruction, and section 19, assault or obstruction of a peace officer. I will follow up with the Minister for Justice in terms of the assertions and allegations that have been made today in the House. I do not have any background to that but I will follow up on it because I do not understand the necessity for any strip-searching or whatever. The Deputies again used that phrase, which they use with abandon, where they accuse people of complicity in genocide. That is a great old slogan but it is a horrible assertion.
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It is a horrible assertion. It is a demonstrably false assertion and a misreading that is absolutely wrong. It should not be made.
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Deputies complain from time to time about assertions made about them and others. That assertion is very fundamentally wrong. It speaks to a kind of philosophy and mindset that is about how they can blame the Government or Irish parliamentarians for what is going on in Gaza and not the Israeli Government.
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Those Deputies' approach always seems to be, "Let us blame the Irish Government", rather than putting the blame where the fault lies. They are attempting to drive a wedge between the Irish people and the Irish public representatives who are not of their persuasion.
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