Probe unlikely to point finger of blame

A WIDE-RANGING investigation into the November floods crisis may not make specific concrete conclusions on who is to blame for the €100 million damage caused to Cork city.

Members of the Joint Oireachtas Committee on the Environment have told the Irish Examiner that despite two months of inquiries, the group’s report may be unable to explain exactly what happened at the ESB’s Inniscarra dam.

A full meeting of the committee, which was established to examine issues surrounding the national floods last November, will today confirm the draft timeline and structure of the cross-party investigation’s final report.

This will form the basis of the likely findings to be made by the committee in late April or early May.

However, the group’s chairman, Fianna Fáil TD Seán Fleming, has confirmed that while the recommendations will detail what happened they are expected to stop short of assigning blame for the crisis.

And he added that while calls for a further public inquiry to focus specifically on the Inniscarra dam issue have been made, the question of who is responsible for the Cork city floods may have to be answered “in the courts”.

“We will have a long-table discussion on it among ourselves in the meeting, but that is what’s likely,” the Fianna Fáil TD, who represents Laois-Offaly, said.

“We are likely to be commenting in the report specifically on Inniscarra and the communication between ESB and the councils.

“We will also be considering the high water level in the dam before the discharge and that changes may well need to be made, but we are unlikely to be assigning blame.

“Blame won’t fix the damage, and that may have to be sorted in the courts in due course,” he added.

Reacting to the comment, Cork Flood Action Committee (CFAC) spokesperson, Aideen Cronin, said the situation meant an independent public inquiry into what happened is now unavoidable.

“If that’s what they’re likely to recommend, if they don’t think they’ve gathered enough facts, then we want an independent inquiry.

“There are a lot of inconsistencies in what some groups have said, Met Eireann for example said it was a one in 50-year flood and other reports said it was a one in 1,000-year event.

“We want to know if something happened to cause ESB to release a sudden discharge of water.

“We have asked ESB 15 times for the daily load report for their two dams, but haven’t been given the information, so if the Oireachtas committee don’t put responsibility with someone then we want an independent inquiry,” she said.