"We have to accept it. It was down to too much rain, an act of God," said pharmacist Mr Brendan Quinn in Bridge Street, Gort, who had to close his business twice due to flooding in 1995.
At the time he heaped sandbags outside the shop door and felt he was back in his native North. "It was like a machinegun turret!" He received some compensation from insurance for damage which cost about £12,000.
Since then, he has refitted the premises and made "mechanical adjustments", including rails into which he can insert his own dam. "The combination of scaffolding and a dam should do the trick."
He does not believe engineering and drainage works offer complete protection, but believes flooding could happen again. "We are only 60 feet above sea level here, and there was a spring tide of 31 feet that week and torrential rain." An option that might have been considered would have involved sluicing Coole Lake. "The lake is like the sink before the drain."
Many preventive measures have already been taken following an inter-departmental committee established in 1995 under the chairmanship of the late minister of State at the OPW, Mr Hugh Coveney. The committee agreed that responses to flooding were best handled at local level, and emergency plans involving Galway County Council and other agencies were reviewed.
"There is unfortunately no magic wand which can solve all the flooding-related problems which your area and others face," Mr Coveney said in a letter in January 1996 to Mr Paddy O'Grady, secretary of the South Galway IFA.