Floods need focus put on planning to reduce costly damage

It would be easy to view the recent storms and flooding as inconveniences or irritants that happen once a year, or even a few times a year, but that we soon forget as we go about our normal lives.

However, the disruption to lives, to work, to productive output, the costly damage to infrastructure and to the economy, as well as the expense of continually ameliorating the underlying causes, are a major drain on our resources.

It is money that could be better spent elsewhere, if only those responsible had done their jobs and prepared properly.

Over the last year, there have been considerable improvements to our economy.

There is more optimism.

People are again beginning to spend money and purchase discretionary and non-essential articles.

However, nature has a way of bringing us all back to earth with a bang.

But whilst nature hit hard, the end result did not have to be so bad.

Much of the damage has been self-inflicted.

It’s much like the impact of the recession — much worse than it needed to be, because of government ineptitude and inaction.

What we’ve seen and heard, over recent weeks, are a testament to the ongoing failures of our politicians, both local and national, to not only put in place corrective and preventative measures, but to make sure that the procedural planning failures that caused so much of the flooding are not repeated.

One of last Tuesday’s headlines went: ‘Clonmel woman’s home has flooded for the ninth time’.

However, the headline that caught my attention was ‘Floods; Bandon caught off-guard by 40 floods in 20 years’.

There is an old saying that goes; ‘Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me’.

One can only wonder what you are if you are ‘fooled’ 40 times in 20 years?

It’s not as if rain is an unusual concept to us Irish.

In fact, weather, usually bad, is the main topic of conversation and the start of most conversations and greetings.

The bottom line is that there are areas of our country that flooded long before we even heard concepts ‘climate change’ and ‘global warming’.

Clonmel and Bandon are two such towns.

Mallow and Fermoy are two others, not so far from home.

There are tens of others, up and down the island, where flooding happens regularly.

Nevertheless, local councillors, in their wisdom, ignore their own planning and engineering advisers and zone some of those areas residential.

A photograph from 2004 showed a field that more correctly resembled a lake.

It had a sign on it that said ‘For Sale: Land Zoned Residential’.

By all accounts, it was a well-known flood plain.

So, lack of knowledge has never been the issue.

Lack of concern, or perhaps a serious dose of wishful thinking, was the issue.

Whatever, it has cost us dearly. Simon Harris, junior finance minister with responsibility for the OPW, said on Monday that the Government would spend €430m over the next five years on “flood-risk investment and flood works”.

Granted, not all of this is a result of bad planning or bad zoning decisions, but, undoubtedly, a material amount of that money relates to bad or downright wrong decisions by councillors.

The only saving graces are the many thousands of council workers and the emergency services, who gave up their time to help solve the problems created by bad planning.

We realise that climate change will be a major problem into the future.

It is not going to go away and has been discussed for a long time now.

But should we be really surprised?

After all, one of the Taoiseach’s final responses to the Global Conference on Climate Change, held in Paris, was to say that the deal must not compromise Ireland’s food industry.

The bottom line is that we either play our part to reduce harmful emissions or, alternatively, we spend more and more money on flood defences — money that could be spent more productively elsewhere.