Patrick O’Donovan [FG, Limerick] wants to drain the Shannon. Or wants farmers to do it. He doesn’t want the “multiplicity of agencies [which] have made it virtually impossible for anything to be done with the river and the rivers and streams draining into it”; he wants a non-multiplicity of agencies — “the OPW, the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government, Inland Fisheries Ireland or whoever” — to dig sheughs and stop flood plains flooding. He says
The one group of people who seem to have no say are those who live on the banks of the rivers or who have watched thousands of gallons of water coming in their front door and out their back door.
But he is wrong. That is the one group of people who can stop flood waters coursing through their houses and who can do it most quickly, most easily and without the permission of a single state agency.
The solution is simple: they should move house, away from the flood plains to higher ground.
Irish waterways history 