I would like to convey my condolences and the condolences of all my colleagues in the Labour Party to the families of Clare O'Neill, Michael Pyke and Fintan Goss. When Met Éireann warned of a risk to life, we all hoped that it might not prove to be the case. Unfortunately, it clearly was. The three families most involved have our sympathy and condolences and those of everyone in the House and throughout the country.

In the past 48 hours we have been served incredibly well by a wide range of public services. Met Éireann and the Office of Emergency Planning made sure that we were warned in a timely fashion of the imminent danger. The call to issue a red alert for the entire country must have been a difficult one to make but it was the right one. The calls by the Minister for Education and Skills and the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs to close all schools and crèches were also the right decisions. The decision to stay closed for a second day was the right one as well. It allowed school leaders to assess any damage or risk to children before they actually arrive at their school buildings. I hope the Minister for Education and Skills will also make a sensible call not to require schools to make up these days - clearly this could not have been planned for.

Countless others deserve our thanks, including the council workers in every council throughout the country, who worked through the night to clear trees and debris; the rescue services personnel, who put their lives at risk in some places where they really should not have been required to, as others have said; the public service broadcasters, public and private, at local and national level, who kept reminding people of the dangers that were evolving during the course of the day; the Garda; local authorities; ESB Networks crews; the Coast Guard; and RNLI volunteers – I saw the RNLI crew in my constituency take to the high seas when I was fearful of walking down the street yesterday. All these deserve our great thanks, as does the Government. The Government acted with calm throughout this particular episode. The Taoiseach can be happy with the work of his Government during the past 48 hours.

The severity of the storm certainly deserves a debate in the House as to our readiness for the overarching issue of climate change. The House has not debated the climate mitigation plan referenced by the Taoiseach. Such a debate would be timely, especially if it was well in advance of the publication and determination of the ten-year capital plan.

In the meanwhile, I have two questions. The first relates to how red alerts are understood. On Sunday night, we saw many companies unsure how to deal with their employees. Should we not have a clear understanding throughout the economy, as is the case in the education sector, of what should be done in the event of a red alert? I came across a report last year that goes back to 2010. The current Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade, Deputy Coveney, was the Minister responsible at the time. It related to establishing a national text alert system. Public broadcasters are well and good but we could have a system, as envisaged in the 2010 report, where every individual in an affected area would have a specific warning. Is that something the Government will now look at?

I thank Deputy Howlin for his kind words about our public servants and everyone who helped out yesterday and today with the clean-up. They will continue this in the weeks ahead. I echo his comments on that point. I was enormously proud of our public service yesterday and today and I think we saw the public service at its very best. I want to thank him for his kind words about the Government and my Ministers. It does not often happen in this Chamber, so when it does-----

It will not happen too often.

I want to thank him for that.

I would be happy to have a debate on that and on climate change more generally but that would be up to the Business Committee. We will need to examine what a national red alert means. It was the first time we have ever had a national red alert and the whole country only went red on Sunday, 15 October, at 1 p.m., when certain decisions had to be made. One decision was to close schools and that was made within a few hours of the national red alert issuing. A decision was made that we could not leave it up to individual school boards and so on to decide and that it had to be done on a national basis. It caused genuine confusion for some people in the private sector because it was unclear to people as to whether or not they were to go into work. The advice we gave people was not to do any unessential travel but going to work is essential for many people. We will have to develop a better understanding of what a red alert means beyond the public sector and what it means in the private sector.

I am not sure if a national text alert is still in the offing. SMS is used much less frequently than it was in the past. It is probably dying out as a technology. People tend to use WhatsApp, Internet messages and so on. Any consideration would have to give some view to that and what the correct mechanism for informing people would be. I would like to say, as Deputy Martin said, that the media, and the national media in particular, were very helpful in getting messages out, including RTE, TV3 and others. The front page headlines on the newspapers on Monday morning were also very helpful. I do not think anyone who saw the front pages of the major newspapers on Monday morning could be in any doubt as to how serious the storm was.

The national adaptation framework consultation is open until 27 October, so we are still in the consultation phase. Once the Minister has the opportunity to consider the submissions, it will be brought to Government and published thereafter.

I welcome the Taoiseach's commitment to having a full and proper debate on the climate mitigation plan. We might agree that we will do that in the next week or two and certainly well in advance of any final decisions being made with regard to the capital plan because it is important that we put money into an area that we are talking about and are now convinced about.

My second question is on how we act when there is a red alert. I had conversations with members of the Government on Sunday evening and we decided to close our own offices around the country. I had to ring people I had arranged to meet on Monday morning, including employers, who did not know what to do. We need to know, when events like this might occur, what specifically is expected of employers and employees in the event of a red alert affecting their area of work. A commitment by the Taoiseach to provide such guidelines would be very welcome.

I am happy to give that commitment. This is the first time we have ever had a national red alert. We have had red alerts in individual counties or groups of counties before but not on a nationwide basis. If guidelines do not exist already, which I do not think they do, it would be a very good idea to issue guidelines as to what alerts mean in many different circumstances, particularly for private sector employment. We can certainly work that into the review and have it considered by the next meeting of the Office of Emergency Planning in November.