I thank the Minister of State for all his hard work in different parts of the country. I saw him manning the pumps a good many years ago in Athlone town. He has lived with flooding and he understands it. I also want to thank the late Teachta and iar-Aire Martin Mansergh, who did a lot in that Department. He passed away recently and we sent our sympathies to his wife Liz and family. He was a Minister who helped greatly in many areas but mainly in Clonmel. We had trouble and problems in Clonmel for decades but we have a great scheme there now. Obviously, there are little tweaking problems with pushing the water back. I want to shout out to the Clonmel borough district area staff and the engineering staff, Gillian Flynn and Paul Coffey, and thank them for their work putting up the flood defences each time there is a bad forecast. They are working, thank God. However they will not stay working. We have the folly here from our left-wing colleagues. Tá siad imithe now, like snow off a ditch. They come in and put out their fancies. Deputy O'Gorman was talking about keeping water up on the side of a hill. How would you keep water up on the side of a hill unless you had it in a bucket? He could not even hold a bucket at that. The Waterford deep-sea port was cleaned biannually for decades, up to about 25 years ago. It is not cleaned any more. Every piece of dirt off a roof or dust off the streets and roads, fields, building sites or anywhere else eventually washes into the rivers. There is no place else to go. We must clean the rivers or the flood defences will be rendered useless. I sympathise and empathise with the people all over Wicklow, Wexford, Waterford and many other areas who were flooded. It is not a nice situation because you do not just get water, you get lots of other stuff as well. As I said, we had solutions offered to us from Denmark and Holland, imaginative schemes about moving water on faster. We also had offers of land south of Clonmel where we would deepen the river, take the topsoil off the land, put in all the spoil and put it back again to grassland, but no, the ecologists said we have frogs, snails and everything else. People's lives and property and the people who cannot get insurance are much more important than all these ecologists and these green people who tell us we cannot do this because of snails and everything else. We need reform also in the OPW.

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