Michael Fitzmaurice (Roscommon-South Leitrim, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am grateful for this opportunity to speak on the Bill. For the past ten or 15 years I have listened to people speak about global warming, and when that Houdini act did not work they headed to climate change. Let us be clear on a few matters. In recent years we have heard about climate change and flooding in Dublin, Cork and Galway. The fact is that 40 or 50 years ago we had only approximately one third of the concrete or houses in Dublin that we do now. Cork is built on a flood plain. If something is built on a floodplain, when it rains a bit there will be flooding. Anyone with an engineering background knows that if two or three times the amount of houses or buildings are built, which are needed and I do not say they are not, but infrastructure to take away water is not provided, then obviously the water will not travel quickly enough.

A little common sense will reveal that it will back up and we will have flooding.

I have heard county managers clinging to the term "climate change". Everything is blamed on climate change now. They should look at the reality of what has gone on. The fact is that it is probably because we did not put in the infrastructure to take the water away. Where there was once a field, now there is concrete. Anyone with common sense knows that it has to run off somewhere and if we do not have something to take it away, then we have a problem.

Another question arises in respect of places like Limerick and along the Shannon. Down through the years we have heard taoisigh promise to drain and clean the Shannon. The fact is that because of fundamental environmentalism, anywhere we try to clean a drain or a river or anywhere we try to do good and let water flow, we are blocked. A man needs a suitcase full of forms to try to do anything. It is a question of the volume of silt that goes into a river. It is like a glass: if we half fill it with silt, then obviously it will only hold half of what we need it to hold. However, at the moment, these works are not being carried out. People in Ireland are the goody-goodies of Europe and we listen to everything they say. By doing so, we are going to drown ourselves. Given the levels of rising water in different parts of the country and as a result of fundamentalism, we have seen birds being drowned. Then, we talk about losing some of our habitats. That is the reason. If we talked or listened to the people, the stakeholders, who understand how life works in rural parts of Ireland, they would explain it simply.

When we look at the television we see weather alerts for this, that and the other. When I was a youngster I could listen to the radio and hear of winds of 90 mph. Now, if we hear of winds of 100 km/h, there is a yellow or orange alert. In 1985 and 1986, we had two wet years. In 1947, we had a great snowfall. Was that climate change? Was that global warming? What was it? If we get a little slow now, it is all put down to climate change.

I listen to this day in, day out in the line of agriculture. Some years ago I saw a Minister decide, following a great brain-wave, to put canisters on the backsides of cows to see what they were doing. If we look at what we take in by growing barley, different crops or grass, the reality is that it amounts to approximately 3%. We must make decisions as a nation. Are we going to decide that we cannot have cattle? We should remember that this is what most of our country lives on. We are going down a road of lunacy at the moment with this talk of getting rid of them. I have heard people talking about our national herd. We have to live in the environment we are in and we have to farm our land. We cannot simply decide that we are going to get rid of one thing or another.