Looking at the bigger picture, in 30 years' time, in 2056, it is estimated that the sea level will have risen by up to half a metre, so we are talking about a lot of land along the coast that will be decimated no matter what we do, no matter how many Y-shaped concrete structures we put in. In terms of being strategic with that climate change risk, we have to look at certain areas that will have to be lost to the sea, like they have done on the east coast of Great Britain, and strategically retreat from certain areas. We have to say to people, "We are going to pay for you to have a brand-new insulated house but a little further back." Then we have to focus on the areas we can actually protect rather than trying to fight the indefensible. When you look at the likes of Dublin, from a housing perspective, as I have said before, but equally from a flood perspective, we need to start to go up and we need to start building houses on stilts. We should look at what is happening in the Netherlands and plan for future inundations in areas of high population density. At the same time, one-in-a-hundred-year floods are now one-in-20-year floods, and with the rainfall affecting a lot of the rivers around our country, we will have the same level of inundation. In my constituency we have had several unanticipated floods over the past two decades and it will only get worse. That is because of policy. I note there is a €1.3 billion plan to look at flooding around the country and at alleviation. One of the points is about rewilding and replanting, but I would like to see a little more on that. We have decimated our native forests. Where we have replanted trees we have put in conifers. We are talking about Irish beef being better than Brazilian beef and getting into this big argument. Personally, I believe that if we are polluting the rivers by getting a nitrates derogation to be exporting beef, we are still on the wrong side. We have got rid of a lot of land that used to be a natural floodplain to use it for grazing to produce inefficient beef when we do very little from the tillage end. On the planning side of things, we are not looking seriously enough at green roofs on buildings in terms of soakage. As it stands, we have seen communities around the country - the Celtic tiger was the height of it, but it still happens, including in my constituency - such as the Clonburris SDZ, where, when I was a councillor, we tried to put 442 houses away from a floodplain and put in GAA pitches, which would have served for six to nine months of the year, then building higher at a train station. Unfortunately, certain councillors voted against us on that, so now we are adding to the amount of water going into the River Griffeen and we will see flood instances down the road again. I might be digressing but, even though it is kind of counter-intuitive, we need to look at a strategy for all-weather pitches because more and more of the GAA, rugby and soccer pitches are being waterlogged. We need to have some sort of water storage and proper drainage for grass pitches and all-weather pitches in our communities. However, that is a separate debate. I do not believe that, as a country, we are taking the issue of future flooding seriously enough. It is all about crisis management and putting into place plans that were supposed to be in place 20 years ago and we are looking at it on a community-by-community basis. We are saying Midleton and we are saying Fermoy. That is all welcome and they all need the flood alleviation but we are not looking at the long-term picture that we are going to be fighting crisis flooding for the next couple of centuries. We must look at retrenchment. We have to look at where we are building and where we should not build. We are not looking at that enough. We should be rewilding, planting more trees, which create the soakage, and allowing natural river plains to spread out. We will lose a lot of acreage but we may have a more sustainable way of life for the country going forward. Otherwise, we are going to be spending multiple billions of euro to deal with sticking plasters when we should be looking at the root cause and trying to tackle it as quickly and as early as possible.

Sentiment score: -0.02