Cork flooding: OPW minister pledges to speed up €5.8m Midleton home protection scheme

With Storm Babet’s anniversary approaching, Midleton residents demand faster rollout of Cork’s €5.8m flood defence scheme as 650 homes await barriers

Some 600 houses in Midleton were damaged, along with about 300 businesses, some of which have since closed for good. Picture: Eddie O'Hare

OPW minister Kevin Boxer Moran has vowed to speed up the roll-out of a €5.8m scheme designed to help protect individual houses in a Cork town from flooding.

Set up last year, about 650 of the 725 valid applications for the Midleton and East Cork Individual Property Protection (IPP) Scheme funding have yet to be completed, according to figures from Cork County Council last month.

Residents from Midleton, who met the minister at a public meeting in Castlemartyr National School, East Cork, want the scheme sped up.

The call has come as the second anniversary of the October 18, 2023, Storm Babet is approaching.

Some 600 houses were damaged, along with about 300 businesses, some of which have since closed for good.

Estimates of the total damages vary, but they are believed to be between €180m and €200m.

The minister, who recently announced an increased funding threshold for single minor flood mitigation works from €750,000 to €2m, told the Irish Examiner after the meeting: “The frustrations of people, I have heard and listened to but I have to take it on board and have to do [something about] it.

I gave a commitment to the people that the OPW and the county council will meet every eight weeks and try and drive on what people are looking for. I understand the frustration coming from people.

“As minister, I have their back and I’m here to work with them.”

He said it would be “unfair” to ask the council to put a deadline by which all the IPP scheme home barriers would be in place.

But he promised: “I am going to look into where the problems are, and where the issues are.”

Cork County Council has previously been asked about the amount of time it was taking to install the flood barriers and whether or not everyone who needed flood defences would have them in place before October 18.

In reply, it said it was “aware of concerns around delivery of the scheme”.

But it said work was dependent on “the level of uptake of the scheme and market response” and the scale of the IPP scheme “vastly exceeds that of any similar scheme delivered in Ireland or wider Europe”.

Caroline Leahy, a Midleton-based member of the Midleton and East Cork Flood Protection Group, said: “We have been told it is likely to be next year before the IPP scheme is fully operational and that is just not acceptable.

There is a growing feeling that not only are the issues around flooding not being taken seriously enough, but many of us are wondering will they take it more seriously if somebody were to die?

“We had a lot of near misses in our community in 2023, and we suffered a massive amount of devastation. It was the worst this country has seen in living memory.

“What we can’t understand is why, nearly two years on, is everything dragging on so slowly.”