Government spent €16m on salt as part of winter plan

THE GOVERNMENT has spent €16 million on 200,000 tonnes of gritting salt to cope with any cold snap this year and claims to be better prepared for bad weather this winter than at any time in the past.

Flanked by Minister for the Environment Phil Hogan and Minister for Transport Leo Varadkar, Minister for Defence Alan Shatter yesterday launched a Winter-Ready information campaign.

Mr Shatter said Ireland had experienced two of the coldest spells since records began over the last 12 months. While it was not possible to predict what would happen this year, he said he wanted to ensure the authorities had learned from mistakes made in the past. He said the presence of his two ministerial colleagues alongside him indicated a degree of “joined-up thinking going on at the heart of Government”.

Mr Varadkar said the State will be more prepared than ever before. “Having said that, Mother Nature is more powerful than any government so it won’t be ‘business as usual’ if the country experiences another major weather event.”

He said 200,000 tonnes of salt had been purchased at a cost of €16 million. This is twice the salt levels bought last year and three times what might be expected to be required in a normal year. He accepted all the salt might not be needed. “You are damned if you do and damned if you don’t,” he said.

However, Mr Varadkar warned the salt purchased would not be enough to grit every road and a list of key roads and areas that would be treated first had been drawn up. He also said the State’s airport authorities had invested €7 million in equipment which would allow them to clear runways twice as fast as they were able to last year.

The Government has also established that homeowners and businesses will not be liable for any incidents on or near their property if they clear their pathways of snow and he urged everyone to do that.

Mr Shatter said the objectives of the campaign were to provide practical advice on how best to prepare for the coming winter, to ensure the public was aware of where advice and help can be found and to reassure people that arrangements have been put in place to ensure there will be a co-ordinated response to severe weather events.

The Government has set up a website – winterready.ie – through which advice will be made available from a number of sources including Government departments, the Garda, the Health Service Executive, local authorities and transport providers. An information booklet can be downloaded from the website.

Mr Shatter said many of the costs of the campaign had been absorbed by individual departments but said the outlay on the website and information was about €15,000.

Met Éireann’s Gerard Fleming said there were no reliable indicators as yet about the weather ahead. “We don’t have any indication of particularly severe weather,” he said.