I want to be associated with wishing Tony O'Brien well in any future endeavour he may take. As the Minister who appointed him to that position in the Health Service Executive, I thank him for all his work on behalf of us all in trying to keep our health service going through a very difficult time.

I also congratulate the emergency services. I will not list them all but I want to mention also all the community activists who went out and did so much to support their communities.

Hear, hear.

I want to mention also all the family doctors who kept their premises open until it was no longer safe to do so and reopened on Friday afternoon.

In the context of the weather, I want to speak about an issue raised earlier, that is, coastal erosion, especially in Fingal and Portrane. I was there yesterday evening and there is nothing like standing within 3 ft. of a 20 ft. precipice to remind one of how severe a situation is for a family. Four years ago it was 50 ft. away. On the beach one can see the sand bags that were put down next to the cliff edge to protect it in 2014. They are now some 35 ft. from the cliff base.

I stood in a public park area where underneath the grass, which looked sound, there was 4 ft. of an indent where the sea has taken the sand away and it is deadly dangerous. People who do not know the area, older people or children could easily have a serious accident. The situation for this family is that three generations are living there - Gráinne, Amy and Faye. Gráinne showed me a video of a young man trying to hold the sea back at the height of the tide coming in. He was trying to keep a flimsy galvanised fence up because the original paling they had put up had fallen in. Those people are about to lose their house. We had the Minister of State, Deputy Kevin Boxer Moran, in the House this morning and he told us that he is open to having the situation addressed but we need Fingal County Council, which has done sterling work during the emergency in recent days, to take action and to act now in a compassionate and humanitarian way and with a sense of urgency. We have a homeless crisis and we are now going to add three more people to the homelessness list. We could have a fatality. The situation is very unsafe. There are 14 other houses at immediate risk. How many houses are going to fall into the sea before we take action?

It is time to put aside all the red tape. We have had reports. The then Minister of State, Brian Hayes, was in Portrane in 2012 and we have had several Ministers there since. The time for talk is over and the time for action is now. We can have a medium-term solution. I call on the Minister of State to bring together Fingal County Council, the heritage people and the environmental people with the community to resolve this issue in the medium term, but we need immediate action now to allow this family to save their home. They have been there since before the 1960s, as has that house. Instead of focusing on reasons why we might not, should not or could not do something, could we please take action and prevent another three generations of a family being made homeless? I address this to Fingal County Council. Could we not do the right thing - the humanitarian thing - and resolve this issue and allow those people to save their home that has been in their family for decades?

I will finish by saying that if action is not taken very soon, not alone will this house go but 14 other houses and businesses - a pub, restaurant and chipper - will go as well. Once they breach a little mound, which is only a short distance away, the whole of the Burrow of Portrane will be isolated with 1,200 to 1,500 people living there. How much will it cost to fix that and to put in a new road and bridge? I urge Fingal County Council to please act and to show the humanity I know those involved have and save this house and this family from becoming homeless.

I too pay tribute and thank the front-line staff, the in-house staff and those who worked in hospitals and were out clearing roads and all the volunteers as well as the Army, the Civil Defence, the Garda and council staff - everybody who was involved in the clean-up right around the country. I pay compliment to them and the many volunteers who joined them.

Yesterday was a historic day in Limerick and in the mid-west in that we started off the morning with a visit from the Minister for Business, Enterprise and Innovation, Deputy Heather Humphreys, who announced 600 jobs. Initially, 60 jobs will be based in Shannon Airport and 600 jobs will be based in the mid-west. It was a very welcome, good news story. It is the biggest amount of jobs to be announced in recent years. I welcome Edwards Lifesciences to the area. It showed a video yesterday of its work. The company is involved in making valves for the heart. It is unbelievable what technology can do and how far science has come. I welcome the company to the mid-west.

Later yesterday we had the opening of the new courthouse in Limerick. I welcome the fact that the Supreme Court is sitting there for the next three days. This is the first time it has sat in Limerick. The court rarely comes out of Dublin so it is a very welcome good news story not only for Limerick but for the region.

On a side note, I was a member of the board of Innovate Limerick when I was on the council. We have bought premises where we consider there is potential for businesses to locate.

Yesterday morning we started off with a visit to Troy film studios where 450 people work locally. That is certainly a very good news story in that there are people from Limerick School of Art and Design and others who are in an apprenticeship programme, so yesterday was a very positive day.

I wonder if the Cathaoirleach has recently been down Fitzwilliam Street. It is very interesting. There is an enormous cleared vacant site. It is about the size of a city block. It is owned by a State company, the ESB, and in the 1960s it took on the longest continuous Georgian streetscape in the world and devastated it. It was quite extraordinary. It was an Irish State-owned company and it hired English architects who came here and made the most ridiculous and offensive comments. I recall one of them saying that buildings have a lifetime and these houses were beyond their lifetime. Look at Amsterdam or Rome. There is a church in Rome that was used as a pagan temple during the Roman empire. It is complete and absolute nonsense. This represented the greatest, most ignorant and concerted attack on our cultural heritage. There is nothing like this streetscape in the entire world. The ESB was originally told by the planning department in Dublin County Council to reinstate the facade it had destroyed but apparently it managed to weasel around that. It now intends to put up some other modern architect's idea of what a Georgian facade should be. I suppose it is too late to rectify this but I wanted to express outrage and also to say thank you to people like Desmond and Mariga Guinness who in the 1960s took up this very unpopular cause and set out to defend our Georgian heritage. It is a very sad day when an Irish State-owned company would launch such a devastating attack. This streetscape is irreplaceable. It has gone from being the longest continuous Georgian streetscape in the world to just being another inner city area. I thank the Cathaoirleach.