Galway farmer relives nightmare of ruinous deluge

A smile on his face but tears in his eyes, east Galway farmer Tom Quinn hasn't slept too well since Storm Desmond swept in with its "month-in-one-Sunday" of rain.

“Six years ago, I woke at 6am, put my foot out of the bed and met over a metre of water,” he said. “The turlough had come in over the windowsills. And here it is again.”

The Rahasane turlough in the limestone area of Caherfurvaus outside Craughwell village was only a disappearing lake a few days ago, but now extends as far as the eye can see over fields and gardens and roads.

"I'd say it is about 1,000 acres now, and growing," Quinn's neighbour, Gerry Cloonan, said as both glanced up at more cobalt clouds rolling in from the west.

“I was out of my house for six months last time, staying with my sister, and I’m with her now,” Mr Quinn said. “I’m 40 years living in the house, and that turlough never grew the way it did in 2009, and this past weekend.”

“We’re maybe 50 votes here, so no one in Dublin is going to be that interested in us,” Mr Cloonan said. “We’ll be forgotten about.”

Less than a mile away, the Dunkellin River had transformed into rapids rushing through Craughwell’s main street – cutting the village in half and closing the old R446 Dublin road between Loughrea and Oranmore.

Burst banks

“You see those two wooden flower pots . . . it was up this high on Sunday,” publican

Gerry Raftery

said as he pointed across the road to the pharmacy up the hill from the bridge.

The pub and chemist were among a handful of businesses with lights on, but with virtually no trade or passing traffic.

“The Guinness lorry had to deliver its barrels through the front door – it couldn’t get around the back,” Mr Raftery explained, while his colleagues in Cawley’s pub, across the angry waters, were going to be forced to wait.

Retired driving instructor Bernard Shiel and his wife Mary had already been forced to leave their two-storey house by rigid inflatable at the weekend. "We were taken out by boat in 2009, when the Dunkellin burst its banks then, and I never thought it would happen again so soon," Mr Shiel said.

“When the storm hit on Saturday, it wasn’t too bad, and I got up on Sunday at 5am, looked out, and thought we had been spared,” he said.

“I had my breakfast and after 7am I was going up to shower when the river met me in the hall. The sandbags were out but it was too much of a current,” he said.

Flood-relief scheme

After the November 2009 floods, his insurers contested his claim, Mr Shiel said. “The company told me I had never informed them I was living close to a river. And yet the house was always called “Riverview” so what did they think?

"Fianna Fáil was in government when this happened last time, and Fine Gael promised it would help if we elected it," he said. "And here those politicians are in now with their huge salaries and we have no home, and I'll be expected to pay my property tax and water bills".

Galway County Council commissioned a flood-relief scheme for the Dunkellin River and Aggard Stream, extending some 11km from Craughwell village to the sea at Kilcolgan, after the 2009 floods. The scheme was submitted to An Bord Pleanála in October 2014. There is "no proposed decision date".