"The big feeze"

The big conversation over Christmas and New Year has been the weather but in my view the weather is not the problem. The problem lies in the Irish government response to the extreme weather conditions.

I spent three years in America as a child living in Long Island. The first memory I have is snow up to the windowsill and most of the winters were like that.

My point here is to say that I don't remember things coming to a stop as they have here in Ireland. With climate change the government must plan ahead as our winters are going to get colder and our summers are going to get hotter.

An effective system have to be put in place in order to deal with more extreme weather conditions to avoid the situation where people don't have to go trough the same trauma as we have been witnessing all over the country with people isolated and alone at their home since as far back as 20th December in country areas such as Wicklow, Sligo and Meath.

Government ministers were on holiday while people were struggling to deal with the worst conditions in half century. The minister for the environment for example took two weeks to tell people it was not necessary to run their taps in order to stop the water pipes from freezing.

And now we are in the position of having to conserve water because the water supply is so low and one of the reasons put forward for the water shortage was that people run the taps when was not necessary to do so.

My point is that people could have been told immediately if the minister had chosen to do so.

Last week I was listening to RTE radio show called "Joe Duffy's show" and on Monday night I was watching Pat Kenney’s show called "The Front Line". These two RTE programs showed the lack of a coordinated government response to what the media called the big freeze.

We must learn from other countries where the winters are much colder and much more severe to put an appropriate system in place to ensure that we know how to deal with this better next time.

Why should it take a public out cry for the official bodies to react? All the public bodies should act together to ensure public safety because this what we all hope is not going to happen again can actually happen again and we owe it to ourselves to be prepared so country can keep on providing essential services to all sectors of society.