JOHN CURTIN, a garda from Gort, Co Galway, has good reason to remember the floods which swept across south Galway and north Clare two winters ago. His fine £85,000 home, fronted with Liscannor flagstone, at Glenbrack on the outskirts of Gort, was one of the worst affected. The floodwater reached a depth of over two feet inside the house and stayed for nine weeks, destroying furniture and fittings and rendering the house uninhabitable.
He evacuated with his wife Bernie and their four children to rented accommodation in the area. Two years later, they have just moved into a new home on the Galway road. The house is smaller than the old one and needs a lot of renovation, so Mr Curtin has got stuck into the DIY in his spare time.
It has been a long two years. Apart from the immediate stress of evacuation, dealing with the long term consequences was a nightmare. "We had 12 years of a 20 year annuity mortgage paid. That mortgage would not transfer to another building so it had to be closed."
Although humanitarian aid and a home relocation package was available, by the time the bills were paid the family was back to square one, starting off a new mortgage on a much smaller house.
"The building society took the money out first - the insurance cheque went to them. Then, when everything was paid, they looked for £40 to hand me back the deeds of the house," he says.
His wife smiles ruefully and adds: "We know a lot about insurance - we could write a book on it."
Little was saved from the old house. An expensive fitted kitchen, installed just six months before the floods, had to be scrapped.
Despite their tribulations, they have adopted a philosophical attitude to life's ups and downs. "We're back to where we started 16 years ago when we took out a mortgage and scrimped and saved.
"We could feel hard done by, but where would that get us? You just have to pick up and go on," she says.
Under the relocation agreement, the old home had to be demolished. All they have left are the foundations, a shed, a small plot of land and a few hardy trees that managed to survive.
From their new home above Glenbrack - An Gleann Breac, the "speckled" or rough glen - the Curtins can see the floodwaters slowly rise as this winter's rains swell the turloughs.
Another evacuee with a grandstand view is Mr Gerry Coyne, who also baled out of the glen two years ago. "From my new house I can see the flood rising back there - it's called the New Line; there's a road going out towards Tubber," he says, pointing down the glen.
"It creeps up along all the land, comes down around the back here, through all that land over there and stops. It can't go no further along the hills and then it has to back up."
The big worry is the floods will come back. The complicated system of interconnected turloughs and underground streams in the area has never been fully mapped or investigated before, which is one reason a comprehensive study commissioned by the OPW is taking so long.
No one knows for sure what will happen if there is another prolonged spell of constant rain. The water levels are already high for this time of year and further floods cannot be ruled out.
In the meantime, some interim measures have been taken which may help matters. Emergency sumps have been built in Gort town from which flood waters can be pumped, roads have been raised, and channels dug in fields. Galway County Council has been given the task of co ordinating the response of statutory agencies to any future flooding.
A scheme to protect the upper part of Gort town from flooding has been designed and is on display in the local library. A comprehensive response to flooding in the wider south Galway area has been put on hold, pending the completion of the OPW study.
Already, however, the study has underlined the ecological significance of the area, which is rich in interconnected wetlands and turloughs.
It has also offered two tentative explanations for the 1995 floods, both of which are based on the exceptional rainfall levels in the area in recent years. Since 1989 there have been a number of extremely wet months, and 1990 saw the wettest February on record.
"In the 50 years prior to 1989, the maximum average daily rainfall at this time of year was 5 mm ... since then, that figure has been exceeded twice by over 20 per cent [in 1990 and 1994] and in 1995 by almost 40 per cent," it says.
One theory advanced to explain this exceptional rainfall is that it is part of a cyclical pattern. For example, the period 1915-1925 saw a similar cluster of very wet winters. If this theory is true, then we can expect several more floods before things start to dry out again.
The other theory is that the 1995 flood is an early sign of climate change brought on by global warming.
If that theory proves true then south Galway is in real trouble.