Societal consensus needed to expedite flood-protection projects, says Tánaiste

The immediate climate threats facing Ireland means there must be a collective understanding that flood-protection measures are needed, rather that projects being delayed by having to “go right through to the Supreme Court and so on”, Tánaiste Micheál Martin has said.

Stressing this had to be in the context of consultation and “give and take”, he told the Climate Summit conference at Trinity College Dublin on Thursday: “We have to work on developing societal consensus around adaptation.”

Recent floods in Glanmire and Midleton, Co Cork, the aftermath of which he had observed first hand, were “a climate event” which caused widespread destruction and an indication worsening impacts were happening now rather than in 2050, he said.

“We have to put adaptation more and more on the agenda ... we have been somewhat slow on that,” Mr Martin said.

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The Tánaiste and Minister for Foreign Affairs said there were lessons from the recent Ireland-Wales summit in that Wales was strong in rolling out wind energy “but also on consents”.

“Planning laws is the constant that keeps coming back at us,” he said, adding that it was also a problem throughout Europe.

He said he still believed Ireland could become “the Middle East of wind” – referring to becoming an energy generator – despite angst within the wind energy sector and likely supply-chain issues.

Mr Martin believed Ireland could become an renewable energy exporter; but the planning system has to be made more efficient than it has been.

Minister for Climate Eamon Ryan told the conference the latest scientific report on climate published this week by the American Institute of Biological Sciences confirmed the Earth is in “uncharted territory” with the effects of global warming “progressively more severe”.

He highlighted its conclusion that “unfortunately, time is up” in the face of an alarming and unprecedented succession of climate records being broken, causing profoundly distressing scenes of suffering to unfold. This is “a situation no one has ever witnessed first hand in the history of humanity”, the study says.

“I think Irish people realise we have to act on climate but maybe they still have the sense that it’s somewhere else and sometime in the future,” Mr Ryan said. “What happened to Midleton last week shows that that’s not true. It’s here, it’s everywhere, and we have to act as well as everyone else.”

Mr Ryan said alert systems needed to be developed to anticipate flooding risk in a more meaningful way. “We have very good weather forecasting systems that are fairly accurate; what the localised weather system is going to be like. But we don’t have a similar capability in flood management,” he said.

Improved data on groundwater was also necessary. “The problem in Midleton wasn’t just heavy rain. It was also the fact that the groundwater conditions were very high,” he said.

“I think as part of our adaptation plan, that’s where we’ll need a lot of work – understanding what’s happening in our river basins and having an approach looking at the source of the river right down to the sea. Not just how do we culvert, how do we wall in rivers in the middle of towns, but how do we manage the whole system. I think that’s going to be central to our climate adaptation approach.”