Delugions

It's now a couple of days since John Gormley announced new policies as regards half the country being underwater. Quite apart from him being the Minister for the Environment, you'd think that flooding due to crazy weather is sort of a Green Party thing.

To be absolutely fair, conflating the two events is a little unfair; the guidelines have clearly been a long time in the making, and a very thorough document the report is too (you can read it here, if you're so inclined, although "Don't let people build in flood plains" is a decent summary). Credit the Greens where it's due; any documents they have produced as regards planning and building are well-drafted and well-grounded. The revised Building Control Act and Regulations, for example, are excellent pieces of legislation. If they've presented this as a response to the floods, then it's difficult to blame them; when cities and towns are ravaged by rainfall, it must be nice to show you've been thinking about it all along.

Still, if the Guidelines are fine on their own merits, the response has two blinding weaknesses*.

One: the overwhelming majority of buildings in Ireland have, y'know, already been built. Yay for for getting it right in the future, but there's several million buildings in existence with no defence of flooding whatsoever. There's little enough that can be done about that, not without massive public expenditure. Still, an alteration to the Building Regulations, asking that all Buildings be cogniscant of flood risk, wouldn't do any harm at all. Many of the flooded areas in Ireland weren't "flood plains**", as such; it is possible to build in flooding-vulnerable areas, with certain safeguards (it's common in some American states, where houses are habitually raised about a foot off the ground). If there's already houses in an area vulnerable to infrequent flooding, then it seems acceptable to add more, provided they're adequately safeguarded. It also makes sense to put a code of practice into place for when existing houses, in flood plains, are extended or modified. Still, if another flood happens to come along, it's unlikely to benefit that many buildings.

There are also collective methods of protection against flooding, but most of them are massively expensive. At least some of the flooding was due to inadequate or badly-maintained drainage. Dredging lakes, or building artificial levées and flood barriers, does work to an extent, but it's a fair investment and more complex than it sounds. Creating artificial flood plains is theoretically possible, and has been done elsewhere, but the chances of this happening on a large scale are nil; it would be a huge infrastructural project, and you don't get many of them in a recession.

In other words, while this document is pretty well-drafted, it's about twenty years too late. For his next trick, John Gormley will bail out the Titanic with a teaspoon.

The second problem, if anything, is more serious; while we live in a system where local councillors can overrule planners, the document means nothing anyway. There are enough loose clauses in the document to allow any unscrupulous councillor to overrule it whenever they see it as convenient. For example, take this sentence:

"Planning authorities will ensure that development is not permitted in areas of flood risk, particularly floodplains, except where there are no suitable alternative sites available in areas at lower risk that are consistent with the objectives of proper planning and sustainable development."

Put Michael Healy-Rae in a room with that, and he'll have permitted a housing estate by a river quicker than you can say "gombeen". The document is written for planners, but planners don't make all the decisions. It's a culture that we've created; we're uncomfortable with the concept of planning in this country, particularly in rural areas. This isn't surprising - land has been important in the national psyche for centuries, and the it's-my-land-I'll-do-what-I-like attitude is a direct descendant from this.

Leaving the armchair social anthropology aside, the fact remains; a good chunk of the Irish populace, especially in rural areas, will find a friendly councillor as soon as they get a planning refusal. I'm not going to claim that planners are perfect but, when we systematically undermine them at every turn, it's hardly surprising that we've wound up with a system that can't possibly make long term decisions in the public interest. I mean seriously, this article by Fintan O'Toole tells you all you need to know about how it works.

What's Gormley to do? He could have said that the problem with our infrastructure is systemic, endemic, and entirely a problem of our culture. Or he could trot something out about "planning reform" and hope that it plays. We wouldn't forgive the first option.

Would we?

Today's Irish Times editorial is all the proof you need of the attitude. While apparently maintaining a line of righteous anger, it's very clear on blame. "Ultimate responsibility... does not lie even with the Irish hierarchy as a whole. It lies with the Vatican."

It doesn't, of course. It lies with us. We set up the industrial schools. We ignored the victims. Our doctors and gardaí colluded to send them to those places. The lies told by bishops, following the directives of their superiors, bear no comparison to the lies we told ourselves***. And let's not forget that the priests and bishops and Christian Brothers are Irish people, born into Irish families, raised in Irish societies. They aren't cloned bodysnatchers sent by the vatican, they're the sons and daughters of our culture. That's not the way that media comment is working now, however. We'd rather cast them ourselves as the innocent and powerless victims of a great global conspiracy, trapped within the evil machinations of a paedophile church. We don't like to think of ourselves as collaborators.

There isn't much to link the recent flooding with the Dublin and Ryan reports. The only thing they share is the tone of the backlash; the gratuitous fury of a nation shouting loudly for someone to blame. It's got to be someone's fault, and we seem frighteningly secure in the knowledge that it isn't ours.

*That's pretty good, for an Irish Planning Document. No, really.
** The definition's in that document, but I had to read the bloody thing, so make an effort. C'mon.
***Have you ever heard a first-hand horror story about the Christian Brothers? If not, you're in the minority. And yet this is all a shock to us.