When rural residents start calling for "compensation" their urban brethren can be heard to sigh.
Michael and Teresa Lyons, however, fulfil neither stereotype. Six years ago, they moved from Tallaght to Cornabulla, a townland a few miles from Athlone, under the Rural Resettlement Scheme.
They took over a 40-year-old cottage in sight of the Shannon and spent £23,000 of their hard-earned savings turning it into what locals describe as a "doll's house".
Heeding the advice of old-timers in the area, they first raised the level of the house by 14 ins, then dug 520 tons of filling into its surroundings, all by hand.
Inside, every strip of wallpaper, every pretty border, every little mosaic tile and piece of carefully turned wood was cut and laid by Michael. That done, the cottage got its first coat of whitewash in decades. Then they settled in to the warmth and order of a home created by their own hands.
At 6 a.m. on Christmas morning, the dog's barking woke them up. They stepped out of bed into 4 ins of water, to find the Christmas presents floating towards them down the hall.
Every electrical appliance in the house was inches deep in water. Their only comfort was that it could have been worse; they could have been killed. The thermostat of their waterbed - vital for Teresa, who suffers from rheumatoid arthritis - was within millimetres of being submerged.
Today, the Lyons's "doll's house" is a sodden, foul-smelling shell. They are paying £400 a month for a rented house in Athlone and yearn to move back to Cornabulla, to the peace and the wildlife and the neighbours. The cost of rebuilding, however, is beyond them.
"Every single thing in this house was done by Michael," says Teresa. "Every shilling we had went into it. To Michael, it's the material things that hurt most. To me, it's my heart".
The immediate problem for the Lyons and other flood victims, such as farmers forced to rent land or to fund expensive winter fodder supplies, is that there is "no official assistance whatsoever", according to local TD Denis Naughten.
In these circumstances, Denis Naughten and others believe their demands to be reasonable: immediate compensation for farmers short of fodder and for households with house damage; funding to raise the level of county roads and a single authority to take responsibility for the Shannon.