The floods that have ruined lives, closed hospitals, schools and universities, left motorists stranded and could even costs lives are not an act of God, but the product of a failure of politics and of administration on a local, national and international level that borders on neglect.

As thousands of people clear up their homes and businesses, as drivers try to arrange to have abandoned cars repaired or scrapped, as vulnerable psychiatric patients spend nights away from their familiar surroundings and others fear for their livelihoods, the full consequences of the floods of recent days are only becoming apparent.

This will cost the country hundreds of millions and will bear down on many householders for the rest of their lives as they try with varying degrees of success to reinsure their homes and possessions.

But while some of this terrible damage and hardship might not have been avoidable, so much of it was. At the most basic level of drain cleaning, unblocking gulleys clogged up with falling leaves and the clearance of roadside ditches to ensure dangerous puddles don't form on roads, the level of service is haphazard and unreliable. It seems that partial flooding on the side of the road may have been a contributory factor in the accident that caused the deaths of four Galway students last week, underlining the importance of drainage by roads.

At national level, there has been a failure of policy and politics to curb carbon emissions that contribute to the global warming causing this climate change. The legacy of the past decade has been one of appalling and corrupt planning decisions which have allowed building on flood plains; building regulations that allowed uninsulated, energy-inefficient homes to be thrown up anyhow, anywhere; inadequate flood management schemes which at times have been poorly managed; and now last week, the failure to have a fully working flood emergency plan in operation should the worst happen has added to the misery of tens of thousands of people.

Our failure to plan, to administrate, to enforce, to manage in an integrated way at every level of government is breathtaking.

Just the day before the heavy rain hit the south, the west and the midlands, the Irish Academy of Engineering warned that failure to protect the country from floods would have disastrous consequences.

Their attention was focused on the need to draw up a register of critical infrastructure that we should prioritise given our current limited funds to prevent the sort of out of control flood damage we are now seeing.

As the rains pounded on Thursday, Labour Party energy spokeswoman Liz McManus castigated environment minister and Green Party leader John Gormley for his failure to publish climate change legislation before the UN conference on climate change next month. It will be 2010 before our framework for cutting emissions is debated in the Dáil.

We know well the damage that global warming is likely to do to this country unless we prepare thoroughly, both to reduce the emissions that bring global warming and to protect ourselves from its inevitable effects. Climate change experts are convinced that the sort of changing patterns we are now seeing are not isolated events, but the direct consequence of global warming. We are experiencing the future now.

Earlier this year, a study, "Climate Change in Ireland", carried out by the Environmental Protection Agency and NUI Maynooth, found that rising temperatures were likely to bring 10% more rain in the winter, with the northwest, west and the midlands suffering most from radically changed weather patterns. Among a range of predictions which included higher temperatures, more winter rain, more extreme downpours – and the possibility of summer drought in some areas – was the conclusion that floods that we would expect to see every 10 years would become three- to six-year events within the next two or three decades.

Critical infrastructural decisions in terms of barrages, flood relief, road building and protection of our flood plains need to be taken urgently, not long-fingered into the mid- to long-term. As the December international climate change talks in Denmark approach, the impetus to meet national targets on reducing carbon emissions must be speeded up. This will give us the moral authority to speak louder within the EU fraternity for a greater contribution to a global deal to reduce emissions. Meanwhile, whole villages and townlands destroyed by the rain of the past few days now brace themselves for more heavy downpours this week. The work of emergency services deserves a lot of praise as they rescued stranded householders and evacuated buildings. Local authorities must now devote every resource to ensuring that damage is cleared quickly and readied for the possibility of worse to come.

One thing is clear: this is not an isolated event and we must plan accordingly.