With council budgets slashed, it should come as no surprise that the money isn't there to do the job properly, writes PAUL CULLEN
IRELAND’S INABILITY to cope with even the smallest of emergencies was laid bare once again over the past fortnight as the cold spell brought the country to a standstill.
It wasn’t the biggest of disasters and it happened at a time when most of the country was on holiday, but our failure to manage the challenge posed by the weather was still remarkable.
One centimetre of snow closed Dublin airport for four hours, Dublin Bus and Bus Éireann services suffered massive disruption while most private operators struggled on and local authorities and Government departments played a game of “pass the parcel” in relation to responsibility for keeping the roads free of snow and ice.
Apart from New Year’s Day, when the entire country seemed to stay under the covers, gritting crews did their best to make the main roads usable, but no attempt was made to clear secondary and minor roads where untold numbers of homeowners remained marooned for days.
Government Ministers were nowhere to be seen and overall, the response lacked a sense of cohesion and urgency. With Ireland back to business this week, schools reopening on Thursday and no end in sight to the cold spell, things are likely to get worse before they get better.
Responsibility for funding the maintenance of roads passed some years ago from the Department of the Environment to the Department of Transport, but that department was unable to identify yesterday how much of the roads budget for county councils was allocated to gritting measures.
The department’s view appears to be that there isn’t a problem because no local authority has come to it to complain about a lack of funding for gritting.
The county councils don’t seem to see much of a problem either, apart from the difficulty of procuring enough salt to treat the main roads.
No one seems to think it strange that 34 local authorities are doing this work, thereby duplicating many of the tasks involved, rather than one large authority.
The National Roads Authority has, by and large, managed to ensure that local authority gritting crews keep the motorways free, but it has no responsibility for smaller roads.
Met Éireann supplies local authorities with graphs indicating road temperatures at night and the authorities are obliged to send out gritting crews once the mercury hits zero. In many cases, however, roads have refrozen or snow has fallen again after the gritting work was carried out.
The Garda Síochána also supplies the councils with information about dangerous road surfaces but, where gritting is not being done, it has resorted to putting traffic cones on the roads to warn drivers of the dangers.
Lost in sectionalism and bereft of a clear hierarchy, our attempts to deal with the freezing weather remain doomed to disappoint. With budgets slashed in many councils, it should come as no surprise that the money isn’t there to carry out the job properly.
One way of breaking out of this morass would be to declare the situation an emergency. This is defined by the Office of Emergency Planning as an event that threatens injury or death, serious disruption of services, or damage to infrastructure; two of these conditions, arguably, are fulfilled in the present situation.
The declaration of an emergency, which requires a Cabinet decision, would get over the problem of territoriality and allow extra resources to be found for other budgets to deal with a short-term problem.
The alternative is to stumble on and hope that the nasty weather will just go away.