I have been listening to the debate in the Chamber and upstairs for the past 90 minutes or so and can see that a lot of people are speaking from their own personal experience. I live near the River Glashaboy, in Glanmire, and living in the Cork city area with the River Lee, it is inevitable that our day-to-day lives are affected and shaped by the water around us. I have had to go into people's houses and kitchens, like the Minister of State, that have been affected by flooding, and they are some of the toughest days I have ever faced as a public representative. I think you can do it once, maybe twice, you can empathise with people truly, advocate on their behalf, lobby the council, lobby the OPW, lobby the Government for interventions, but unfortunately, as a number of speakers have said and reiterated here again tonight, sometimes you attend a person's home for the third or fourth time after it has been flooded and you reach a point where, as regards these inordinate delays in the planning system, we really have to question what the hell we are doing when we allow these schemes to go on for ten, 15 or 20 years. I was very grateful to Michael McGrath, when he was Minister for public expenditure in the last term, for the first scheme he signed off on. It was thankfully the Glashaboy flood relief scheme in Glanmire, which started in the summer of 2023. It is due to be completed later this year. Just to give people an idea of the timeline of a successful project, that project started in its planning stage after the floods of 2012, it went out for public consultation in 2016, ministerial confirmation was initially given in 2021 and the contract was awarded in 2023. Even for a scheme that did not have those legal challenges via judicial review, it has still taken the bones of 14 or 15 years to deliver, and that is one that faced relatively little opposition. On the face of it, we need to accept that the system there is unacceptable. There are two other schemes in Cork I would like to mention, the lower Lee and the Blackpool flood relief schemes. The lower Lee flood relief scheme is a massive project. It has faced opposition in the city. Many people have concerns about the height of the walls and about preserving the historic and cultural aspects of the city centre. Nonetheless, the scheme has been devised over a long period and will protect up to 2,100 properties, of which 1,200 are businesses trading every day in the city centre and 900 are homes. Some €20 million of that budget was allocated specifically to maintaining and preserving the city walls, while the bulk of it, approximately €140 million, is for the actual flood defences. Unfortunately, we are again in this cycle where that scheme was initially mooted in 2009. Since then, I have lost count of how many times the city centre has flooded around the quays. I know that scheme and the Blackpool flood relief scheme are with the Minister, Deputy Chambers, and the Minister of State, Deputy Moran, at the moment. The Blackpool flood relief scheme particularly irks me because there is local opposition. In the recent public consultation, 1,000 submissions were received. The vast majority of them, however, over 90%, were submissions in support of the scheme. Many political representatives in the area have used this as a political football, sitting on the fence, backing both horses and talking out of both sides of their mouth, but then you meet the people whose houses are flooded, whose businesses have been lost to this and who cannot get insurance. There is a stage in all of this where we have to prioritise property and people's right to live safely without fear of flooding. We have to prioritise it over environmental considerations in this case. That is a difficult thing to say because we want to preserve the environment. We do not want to see habitats affected negatively, but when it comes to striking a balance, it needs to tip in favour of protecting property and people's livelihoods. The Blackpool flood relief scheme is on the Minister's table. I hope that in the coming months sense will prevail. The worse that can happen with some of these schemes is that the scheme gets approved and people expect earth to be moved, machinery to arrive and the scheme to start. It is often the case, as I said in reference to the one in Glanmire, that it has taken the best part of three years to deliver the scheme. The worst thing in the case of Blackpool, which is at regular risk of flooding, would be to approve the scheme and in the meantime see it flood again. That would be unconscionable. The next point concerns the council response. Nine times out of ten, the council does a fantastic job and it is to be lauded. I live in a constituency that straddles Cork City Council and Cork County Council. I learned from a flood in Glanmire a couple of years ago that both have different responses. I would like to see a more co-ordinated national approach. They are simple things. One of the local authorities might fund skips going into estates to take out damaged property like floorboards or whatever the case may be, and the other local authority might not. Simple things like that really need co-ordination. There needs to be joined-up thinking. If national guidance is required for that, it needs to be issued and funded if necessary. A bugbear of mine, which I have spoken about in here about half a dozen times in the last five or six years, is insurance. We have had successful flood relief schemes. The OPW takes its time doing things but when it implements a scheme, it is reasonably successful. We can point towards Mallow and Fermoy in recent years, where successful flood relief schemes have been implemented and have held up. In those cases, it is difficult when people cannot avail of insurance after the fact. There needs to be some common sense when it comes to areas that have been protected by the interventions of the State and the OPW. They should be entitled to avail of flood insurance where schemes are seen to be viable and are protecting the area. Unfortunately, it is one of those things that get lost between the cracks. We concentrate so much of our time here on an area that has got flooded, the emergency response, getting the Red Cross involved and getting grants out to people. The forward thinking for future incidents, particularly in the area of flood insurance, seems to get put to the end of the queue when we are having these conversations because we jump from crisis to crisis, storm to storm and flood to flood. I would like to see something like a State equalisation scheme like we have in other sectors. It can and should be pursued, and that is only fair and proper. As Deputy Fitzmaurice has said, in the case of Cork city, there are buildings that have been there for hundreds of years in many cases. Our life has evolved. We benefited from the river through trade, culture and commerce over the years. We cannot just get up out of the city, pack our bags and plonk down somewhere else. We need to instigate an insurance scheme that will give people reassurance. Other speakers spoke about drainage, clearing drains, getting into rivers and taking debris out. This was probably one of the most frustrating things I saw over the years as a county councillor. You can visibly see fallen limbs, tree trunks and all sorts of vegetation overgrowth in the rivers. We are repeatedly told by the local authority that we cannot go in because of inland fisheries. I am not asking for a massive dredging plan of the Lee or anything. I am asking for simple things to happen to remove debris. This culture has evolved whereby we cannot do it because we are not allowed. The answer seems to be "No", before seeing how we can go about getting into the river to sort out the problem. I made what was an inappropriate reference to somebody earlier. We have had incidents on a number of rivers in Cork in the past year where there have been fish kills. People have polluted the rivers, the Blackwater in one case, either knowingly or accidentally. A lot of the time people get away with it and do not face prosecution. If they do get caught, they get a measly fine of a few thousand euro. Our local authorities are afraid to go into the river because they might get reprimanded in some way. Again, there needs to be a common-sense approach whereby we would weigh up the merits and the pros and cons, in this case as to whether to intervene. I do not understand the reluctance of local authorities to get in to clear out debris when appropriate, or to clear drains or whatever the case may be.

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