Dairy farmer Malcolm Kidd says it plainly: “The well was dry by five o’clock.” Sixty feet deep, dug in the 1950s and now, in early August 2026, it runs to a trickle by late afternoon. Kidd’s family in Bagenalstown, Co Carlow, now ration the water, which means giving the dishwasher and washing machine a wide berth.
The cows must be prioritised – 135 of them on a farm that is not in derogation. Keeping the enterprise going depends on 15,000 litres a day.
I walk his fields with him. The ground is bone dry and the dead grass crackles underfoot. There’s a word for that sound: crepitate. It is also the sound a failing lung makes. Irish pasture should not crepitate. But farms up and down the country have dried out this summer. This is worst in the south and southeast.
The storm-naming season begins on September 1st, so no sooner are we out of drought than we are into the potential deluge this winter – the clagarnach of rain on a roof, and the threat of it finding a way in. I’ve been there. My place has flooded multiple times and it’s a horror (my insurance won’t cover flood damage). Every year, I fear there will be another one.
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Since the Arterial Drainage Act of 1945, the State has been draining the land at scale: knocking the natural meanders and loops out of rivers, excavating riverbeds, trimming and spraying their banks, and building sluices, culverts and embankments to control the flow. More than 11,000km of Irish rivers have been re-engineered. The resulting flood peaks arrive twice as sharply as before. It is written into law that this work has to keep going; we have, effectively, a statutory duty to keep freshwater moving as fast as possible to the sea. In a drought, we wonder where the water went; in a flood, we can’t believe how fast it comes back.
In 2017, one August night, an intense flood ripped through the village of Clonmany, Co Donegal. Bridges collapsed. Roads washed away. In his field with him last week, sheep farmer Liam Donaghy – whose farm is upstream of the village – pointed to the mountain and told me “the whole surface of the land moved”. He lost land and sheep. The flooding on the peninsula cost the State around €20 million.
In response, the Inishowen Rivers Trust, led by Trish Murphy, decided to try something different. Instead of getting the freshwater off the land as quickly as possible, they wanted to hold it back and let it do what it naturally wants to do when there is a deluge: to seep into the surrounding land.
Clonmany comes from the Irish word cluain: a meadow or pasture that naturally floods, the kind of ground Ireland’s old landscape knew how to use. It is on maps of Ireland; nearly every Clon, Clone and Cloon carries the same word. We drained the water from the land, but never from the names.
Murphy and her colleagues got eight farmers to sign up to the pilot. Into streams in their fields they fitted leaky dams – wooden logs that hold back the water, slow the flow and buy time. Each dam costs about €500, labour included, which is €50 a year for a decade.
The result? It has slowed the flow of water, buying time that can mean the difference between a house or business being ruined or not when the deluge comes.
Earlier this month, a major report, published by the Environmental Protection Agency and led by geographer Mary Bourke of Trinity College Dublin, modelled these nature-based measures against real storms. Sensors were placed on streams to measure what actually happened. At a Cork site, this type of water storage cut flood peaks by up to 38 per cent and spread them out over 2½ times as long, arriving more gently instead of all at once. A similar model at a Wexford site cut peak flow by 32 per cent.
More than 400 people, including politicians, have walked these sites and watched the measures in action. If Ireland hesitates because nobody knows precisely how natural flood measures behave in every catchment, we will never get there.
Germany does not wait for that certainty. Neither does the Netherlands or the UK. They have funded catchment-scale pilots using natural water-retention measures and are monitoring them as they happen. Ireland’s 2025-2030 flood strategy is, the authors of this new report say, more cautious and “infrastructure centric” than any of them. No funded national programme exists for catchments above the towns most at risk. All that is asked for is a feasibility study, not action on the ground.
With this lack of action, and the urgency of where we find ourselves, we will never reach anything close to water resilience. We will continue to firefight, spending public money to mop up the damage of floods and droughts, instead of using that same money to help avoid the damage in the first place. It should not be just about public funds, either. Private corporations that benefit from water resilience – the insurance and property sectors, agri-business, industries – should contribute too.
In January, a rain gauge in Wexford caught 232.7mm of rain (more than twice its normal) the month Storm Chandra sent the Slaney into the streets of Enniscorthy. In July, the same gauge caught 1.5mm. By late July, the soil-moisture deficit across the south-east had passed 80mm. The problem is not just that it’s getting wetter or drier. It’s that water is arriving in ways our infrastructure and highly modified landscape can no longer sufficiently absorb or retain.
For Malcolm Kidd, a new well would mean drilling 400 feet down, deeper and deeper in search of water. His hard ground would need 90 litres per square metre to return to normal. It will not happen, he says. What his land needs is endless drizzle to soften the ground and let it soak in. A deluge instead will slide straight off and cascade all at once into streams and rivers.
The weather is intensifying. It will swing harder between too much water and none at all. It is not the sole responsibility of either nature-based solutions or hard engineering; it is both, in every catchment, starting as soon as possible. Nature-based solutions work. What is needed now is leadership, a bit of risk-taking and action.
