MINISTER FOR the Environment John Gormley was last night challenged by victims of last year's floods in Cork to order an independent inquiry.
The flooding last November caused an estimated €100 million worth of damage to homes and businesses.
The call from solicitor Joe Noonan, who represents over 50 victims of the flooding, followed a recommendation by a joint Oireachtas committee in a report published yesterday for an independent investigation into the cause of the flooding .
The Joint Oireachtas Committee on the Environment report said there was "an urgent necessity" for an independent investigation into the flooding of the Lee Valley and Cork city downstream of Inniscarra dam on November 19th and 20th, 2009.
The ESB, which manages the Inniscarra dam, said at the time that it had no option but to discharge water at an unprecedented 535 cubic metres per second to avoid uncontrolled flooding as water was entering the Lee catchment at over 800 cubic metres a second.
But yesterday, Mr Noonan said that the committee was right to seek an independent investigation and pointed to Mr Gormley's own response to the committee when he appeared before it earlier this year.
"When several members of the committee sought a public inquiry, Mr Gormley said that he didn't wish to pre-empt the findings of both his own departmental review and the joint committee's deliberations," said Mr Noonan yesterday.
"Well, Mr Gormley's own department review was into the emergency response to the floods not into the cause of the flooding and the joint committee have made their views clear, so let's see now whether he will heed their call," he added.
Mr Noonan criticised the committee for drawing no conclusions as to who was responsible and without such findings, there was every likelihood that the victims of last year's flooding in Cork city and the Lee Valley could find themselves facing the same fate again.
"The cardinal rule in Irish public life seems to be that no matter what goes wrong, no one in authority can be held accountable. This in turn makes it impossible to identify the root cause of any problem and deal with it properly," he said.
Cork chamber chief executive Conor Healy welcomed the committee's recommendation for an independent inquiry and said it was vital for the people of Cork if they were to have confidence in the authorities' ability to manage future flood events.
A spokesman for Mr Gormley said the report had just been published and received by the Minister and all of the recommendations would be examined, but any decision to hold an independent inquiry was one that would have to be taken by the Government as a whole.