Dublin Labour MEP Proinsias De Rossa is urging the Government to apply for financial aid under the European Union Solidarity Fund (EUSF) to alleviate some of the cost for local authorities of the damage caused by Monday’s severe flooding in Dublin and along the east coast.
Mr De Rossa said: “I would firstly like to express my sympathies to the families and friends of Celia de Jesus and Garda Ciaran Jones who died tragically in Monday’s floods, and to all those whose homes and businesses were damaged.
“I believe the Government should now apply to the EUSF to defray some of the costs of the clean-up and repair work. This Fund was established in 2002 in response to major flooding in central Europe that year. EU aid is available to help Member States recover from natural disasters depending on the damage incurred. Applications for aid have to be made within 10 weeks of the event,” he said.
Mr De Rossa said that under the existing regulation, the normal threshold for activating the EUSF in Ireland would be damage of roughly 1 billion euro in a single year. However, the Fund can be activated under exceptional circumstances where a specific region has been affected by an extraordinary disaster.
“I believe Monday’s floods fulfil this criterion for large swathes of Dublin and the east coast. While it is too early to estimate the total cost, it is likely to amount to tens of millions of euro and possibly much more - the Irish Insurance Federation has said the cost is likely to be considerable as most of the flooding occurred in densely populated areas,” said Mr De Rossa.
It was on this ‘exceptional circumstances’ basis that Ireland received 13 million euro from the EUSF in November 2010 towards the cost of the November 2009 floods in rural areas, said Mr De Rossa. He said a successful EUSF application would be likely to meet just a small percentage of the overall cost of the recent floods, but that such EU aid would enable local authorities to recoup some of the expenditure incurred in responding to this emergency.
“In making an application, the Government should not repeat the mistakes of its predecessor, which only submitted its application on the very last day of the ten-week deadline after the November 2009 floods. An application for aid in response to Monday’s floods would now have to be made by early January,” he said.
“In the medium- to longer-term we need to ensure that we are better prepared for such flooding in the future. This is at least the fifth occasion there has been serious flooding in Dublin over the past decade - February 2002, May 2004, August 2008, July 2009 and now October 2011,” said Mr De Rossa.
He said that the Government should also review the implementation in Ireland of the EU Floods Directive, which has been in force since November 2009. This requires public authorities to assess the risk of flooding and to take adequate and co-ordinated measures to reduce the risk of flooding. The Government should quickly determine what additional measures need to be taken.
Mr De Rossa also believes that the government needs to address the issue of residents in flood-prone areas who are unable to get insurance. He said this problem has apparently been successfully addressed in Belgium, Spain and France and that the EU Commissioner for the Internal Market, Michael Barnier, has been looking at a possible EU-wide initiative on this issue for the past 18 months.
Approximately 5.8 billion euro in EU funding has been made available to all Member States for the purposes of natural disaster prevention programmes under the 2007-13 programming period. Mr De Rossa says we need to ensure that at least a similar amount, and probably more, is made available under the 2014-20 period.
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