Action needed to tackle flooding in Cork village 

THE impact of Storm Babet flooding during October in the north Cork community of Rathcormac has prompted a renewed call for a promised flood relief scheme for the village.

Cllr William O’Leary told this week’s meeting of Cork County Council that there appeared to be no prospect of 130 flood relief schemes around the country, including a number in Cork, moving forward ‘anytime soon’.

Rathcormac was one of several Cork communities named as locations for proposed flood relief schemes in 2018 under the Catchment Flood Assessment and Management Programme (CFRAM), the largest ever flood risk study carried out in the State which investigated 300 areas believed to be at significant risk.

Under CFRAM there were to be 118 schemes carried out around the country and, in the initial phase, there would be five larger schemes and 31 schemes for under €1m. Other schemes, including the scheme for Rathcormac, would get the green light to go ahead in the latter half of the 10 years from 2018-27.

Adding that he empathized with everybody across the county who had been impacted by flooding, Cllr O'Leary said his motion was unapologetically parochial.

“In terms of north Cork, there was nowhere worse off than Rathcormac as regards the level of flooding and damage that occurred,” said the Fianna Fáil councillor, pointing out that there had been significant flooding in the village exactly a week previous to the Storm Babet flooding.

“We’re still trying to get to the bottom of how and why that happened,” said Cllr O'Leary.

In the aftermath of the flooding which followed Storm Babet, Cllr O’Leary wrote to the Minister with responsibility for the Office of Public Works, Patrick O'Donovan, to ask him to expedite the flood relief scheme for the village in light of the damage caused.

He told his fellow councillors that the Minister, in his response, had tried to ‘put it back on Cork County Council’ and said that the authority had advised that ‘it was currently assessing with a view to the implementation of any interim measures that can be put in place to provide some benefit in this case to Rathcormac.”

Mr O'Leary said the response to his motion from the county council engineering department was ‘vague’. 

“It’s no good to me to go back to people at home in Rathcormac and say ‘they’re looking at it’,” he said.

Mr O'Leary added that he knew he wasn’t going to get what he was looking for at Monday’s meeting but he wanted to know what council engineers were doing, were they compiling a report, evaluating interim measures or what was being considered.

He also asked about how quickly the council would move in respect to Rathcormac.

Seconding the motion, Cllr Frank O'Flynn said he recalled when an exhibition had been put on display in Rathcormac demonstrating how the flood relief scheme would work seven-years-ago and proposed that the council would write again to the Minister to seek the prioritization of the scheme once again.