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RADIO REVIEW:‘THERE’S A wild wind blowing,” reporter Jonathan Clynch said on News At One (RTÉ Radio One, weekdays). And he wasn’t talking about the ill wind of industrial discontent. If the flooding in the west wasn’t bad enough, the roof blew clean off an apartment block in Carrickmines in Dublin on Wednesday. It was as apt a metaphor as any for a country that has seen its fairytale turn sour, helped by the misbegotten deeds of a small coven of developers, bankers and politicians, writes QUENTIN FOTTRELL

“I heard a loud bang,” said Hazel Melbourne, who lives in the now-roofless building off the Glenamuck Road in Dublin 18. “I was just sitting in my living room and, as if I was in The Wizard of Oz,the roof flew by my window.” Later, Niamh Sweeney spoke to a traumatised Mike Finn, who owns a furniture shop in Gort, Co Galway, a business that is now flooded and all but ruined. A 17-acre lake had appeared behind his shop. “Omigod!” Sweeney declared. Twice.