Community has its own emergency response plan for the 'field of miracles'

LIKE A “thief in the night” is how Eddie Stones describes the river Shannon’s dramatic movement in southeast Galway over the weekend.

Stones, custodian with his wife, Lucy, of the Emmanuel House of Providence in Clonfert, had been expecting up to 1,000 people to pray at the weekend.

However, this was before he was confronted with the sight of the Shannon flowing some three kilometres across fields and right into his back garden.

The tiny village of Clonfert translates as “field of miracles” and is renowned for its 12th-century cathedral with its distinctive doorway and for a monastery founded in the 6th century by St Brendan the Navigator.

“We might be making a Brendan voyage out of here yet,” one of several shocked visitors noted, as he laboured with the intensive relief efforts to try and keep the rising river at bay.

It was as if poet Edmund Spenser's forecast in The Faerie Queenehad come to pass, with "the spacious Shannon spreading like a sea".

Throughout the weekend – ironically, bright and dry but bitterly cold – an entire local GAA hurling team worked with Irish Farmers Association (IFA) Connacht vice-president Michael Silke and fellow neighbours to place layer after layer of sandbags around Emmanuel House, and homes close by.

Initially, farmers used slurry tankers, until pumps were found. “Emergency response plans? It was this community that provided the emergency response,” Silke said, admitting that he and up to 70 others worked through the darkness. He did not sleep for 48 hours. Some 148 acres of his 150- acre farm near Eyrecourt are under water.

Even early yesterday morning, the water was still rising in Clonfert. “We thought we had the kitchen saved, and then the river came up through the floorboards,” Fr Michael Kennedy said. “Thankfully, it hasn’t touched the oratory, so far. We’re downstream from Athlone, so when the water levels began to drop there I guess we were next.”

“We got no warning,” Brian Hernon, who lives with his partner Angela Mahon in Roller estate close by, says.

“I had to kick up blue murder to get some action from Galway County Council. When they came, they left us just 12 sandbags, by which time Angela’s son Raymond was already on his way from Portlaoise with 500 bags and three workmates.”

Distraught, Ms Mahon described how the Garda had arrived in the early hours of Saturday morning and told her to leave the house. “I went, but I knew I would come back. Everyone has been so brilliant, trying to help me save the place. I’m still not convinced we are going to win.”

Bishop of Clonfert Dr John Kirby arrived in wellingtons, as did Fianna Fáil east Galway TD Michael Kitt. Minister for Agriculture Brendan Smith had visited south Galway the evening before, but did not notify the IFA.

“Most of us had no idea he was here until he was back in Dublin,” Silke said.

“I hear there are three MEPs up in the air – it is down on the ground they should be, to witness the human suffering.”

Both the bishop and Silke were critical of State inaction over integrated management of the Shannon. The 386km (240 mile) river has a 15,000 sq km catchment, spreading over one fifth of the island.

“I’m from Athlone, and I remember the benchmark year for flooding there of 1954,” Dr Kirby said. “A series of decisions were made in recent decades to raise levels in Lough Ree and Lough Derg, which has now had a very serious impact on people’s lives. There is an urgent need for one single authority to take control.”

Silke concurred. “In 1979, a move to raise Lough Ree’s level by 0.61 of a metre was given statutory effect, but we need to revisit that,” he emphasised.

“We need a properly funded water management programme and one single body with statutory powers. Otherwise this is going to happen again and again, with devastating impact on people’s lives.”