For weeks after Storm Debi ripped across Ireland in November 2023, the heart of Clarinbridge in Co Galway was plunged into darkness.
An unprecedented storm surge had battered The Bridge Centre, located where the river Clarin meets Galway Bay, and submerged it in more than 1.5 metres of salt water.
The complex contains the local shop, cafe, pharmacy, garden centre and hairdresser – everything a village needs to function. The flood left each business facing its own existential crisis.
For Anne Forde, owner of the PoppySeed Cafe, this was a moment she had been silently dreading for years.
Her cafe, like every other business in The Bridge Centre, was without flood insurance and if she was going to survive, she was going to have to find her own way to do it.
“It was horrendous, we were brought back to a shell and core premises. We lost equipment, the wall partitions, all of our furniture, a huge amount of kitchen equipment. We had to rip up the floors and everything off the walls. It was back to a concrete shell,” Forde says.
“It was a horrendous hit to the business mid-November, a bad month of trade anyway but at least you have Christmas coming. We lost three full weeks of trade and we had to work 24 hours a day to get back for Christmas. We lost stock, we lost time, we lost everything. It was rough.
“About eight years before Debi I got a call from the [insurance] broker who said that I was now in a flood zone and I wouldn’t have flood cover going forward. There was no negotiation with them.”
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Having previously not been flooded since the 1960s, The Bridge Centre has suffered floods on three occasions over the past 15 years. Located in a special area of conservation, flood protection is not considered to be a viable option to protect the area.
Without any flood insurance, Forde had to rely on Government funding through the Red Cross and the support of family, friends and the local community to keep her business afloat.
She says that if any of these supports had not been present, the business simply would not have survived.
“I came in around 6am on the day after the flood and the place was disgustingly dirty – it was horrible. I was looking around and I really didn’t know how we were going to attack it,” Forde says.
She left to attend a meeting with politicians and came back to find “a wave of local people who were ripping up the old floor, pulling down the wall”.
“I can’t explain how it happened and I can never express enough gratitude for it.”
Forde believes she had “a certain responsibility” and “a duty” to reopen but she admits that had she thought about it fully, she may not have done it.
“There is now always the risk that it will happen again,” she says.
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“I couldn’t have waited for a builder to be available to come and do the work, I couldn’t have paid a builder anyway. The only funding available was funding from the Red Cross. If it wasn’t for that, there wouldn’t have been a decision to make, we would have been done.”
Next door to the PoppySeed Cafe sits the Clarinbridge Garden Centre. A fixture in the village for decades, it suffered damage in excess of €112,000 during Storm Debi.
Owner David Farragher says the inability to obtain flood cover is calling the viability of the business into question.
“It is nerve wracking,” he says.
“You wouldn’t want to think too much about it. It is a cost that has to be borne by the business and if that cost becomes more frequent, then I have a problem.
“That cost might get too high and that will be the end of it,” he says.
“I feel a lot of loyalty to Clarinbridge and to the staff here. But I don’t know how viable this premises will be in the years to come.”
Farragher says that even though he did not have insurance, he was able to pay part of the costs and the Red Cross was able to pay another part.
“There is no way that I would have been able to bare the whole cost of it on my own,” he says.
“I was always going to reopen [after the flood] but if you asked me would I do it again, that is a different question. That would be more debatable.
“One thing I am certain of is that the future of the garden centre in its current location is in doubt. I don’t know if it will be there in 10 years, I don’t know.
“It’s only a matter of time before it happens again. If it becomes more frequent, then there is a very strong argument not to be here. You can’t keep doing it. You can’t keep recovering. Why would you do that? That would be insane.”
