John Gibbons

speaker

873 appearances 6 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 10 Sep

John Gibbons’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 2.

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The Last Word with Matt Cooper · Environment: Should We Stockpile Food To Prepare For National Emergencies? · 27 Aug 2026 podcast

So if we assume there's about two million households in Ireland, we're looking at a an annual fund of about fifty million euros.

Uh and the idea with this, interestingly, they say that this means no net additional cost to the average household.

Now, I'm not quite sure how a how you get a twenty-four euro levy that doesn't have additional costs, because of course we already

have insurance levies for I think for bailing out the likes of Quinn insurance and so on that are that we're all us insurance payers are already paying.

So how this one can be can not increase our insurance uh while being added to it, I'm not quite sure.

I suppose some of the interesting things in it, they're they're suggesting that we need to establish, and I would have to agree with them on this, a dedicated flood agency to oversee a framework of flood risk assessment and so on.

Because I know we've just

Yeah.

You can bet your bootlaces that between now and next spring we're going to have another flooding disaster somewhere in Ireland.

We know that because we have uh pumped up the hydrological cycle.

We've got a lot more rainfall.

And of course, when that rain comes down, what we're finding is the patterns in Ireland have changed and we're getting much more torrential rainfall.

So I think it's prudent.

I mean, we reckon at the moment that about a hundred thousand homes in Ireland are struggling to get

Get a flood insurance.

Now I would say there is one thing that concerns me, Matt, about this issue, and that is the the principle of moral hazard.

If if, for example, we have a a flood insurance policy that's paid by everybody, where is the incentive to not build on a floodplain, to not buy your home in a floodplain, if the rest of us are paying for your risk?

And we had recently the deregulation or the move towards more one off houses in rural Ireland.

Which will end up in soggy fields.

So should we, the rest of us, be paying the flood risk for people who decide to to build somewhere that is in a potential flood risk zone?

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