Common sense is not that common when it comes to Government policies. I will take the Minister of State on a small history lesson. Is he old enough to remember the Board of Works? I am. It went around and cleaned our waterways to allow for clear passage of water. Then, the OPW was set up. I mean no disrespect to the Minister of State as he is only in his position for the past 12 months, but coming from a rural background, he will have knowledge of and understand the need to keep rivers clear. We also have to protect wildlife but nobody is protecting the people. Both have to be protected. When the OPW goes to a river now is not allowed touch the riverbed. It can touch the sides but people tell me the sides of the rivers are eroding and they are losing land. I visited a house a number of years ago in Abbeyfeale. The woman's husband has passed since. The back wall of their house was ready to fall into the river. They had to negotiate with Inland Fisheries Ireland and the OPW. All they wanted to do was divert the water a small bit so they could build up a retaining wall. The negotiations on protecting their home took two years. The ports are dredged because silt builds up. Silt builds up everywhere, on every waterway. We want more houses to be built but the Government does not allow for any maintenance of gullies and waterways to take away the excess water. It could be synchronised by doing it on rotation, which would protect wildlife and households. The houses flooded at the moment have been flooded because of bad policy from the Government and bad maintenance because it will not maintain the rivers. The rivers have to be dredged to allow for the amount of water passing at the moment in order to protect houses. That is the reality. Until the Government gets the flood defences put in place to protect houses, it has to dredge in the interim. If a branch of a tree falls into a river, people have to go through a large amount of red tape to get removed. Newcastle West flooded, as did Abbeyfeale, Kilmallock and Dromcolliher, and that is only to mention a few. All of that was down to a lack of maintenance. The second they flooded, the machines were in and started cleaning the riverbeds straight away. Do it now. Put maintenance in place now to dredge the rivers to make sure water can run freely.
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Sorry, Chair. On a point of order-----
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There was not one thing in that ten-minute speech about cleaning the rivers or maintenance-----
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-----and not one thing about protection of people's homes.
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You have to allow a point of order, Chair.
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On a point of order, from the point of view of people's homes, there was not one thing in the ten minutes-----
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People's houses are flooding because of the Minister of State. There is no maintenance.
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Oh, the Minister of State is-----
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If you will allow me to speak, Chair-----
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