Water has destroyed houses, making people and animals ill as misery seeps everywhere
IN SHANNON Harbour, flooded-out farmers are clinging on in Third-World conditions, sleeping rough in wrecked houses where water with floating dead rodents reaches half-way up to the countertops.
They are risking their health and – with parts of their fields flooded to eight feet – their lives because they are afraid to leave their cattle, and they fear looters. They are constantly wet and cold.
As they stand thigh-deep in cold brackish water in what was once a well-tended dry farmyard – now a stranded island where a herd of cows huddle – three farmers talk about their plight with expressions of utter despair, desolation and hopelessness.
They have been struggling for 10 days against the floods, without State help, without warmth and with little sleep, and they say they have nowhere to turn.
“We are refugees, and no assistance is being offered to any of us,” says Tom Guinan, who is living – without water, electricity, a way to eat breakfast, or toilet facilities – on the top floor of a house where the ground floor has already been destroyed. His land is worthless now, and he thinks his only future is to emigrate.
At Paddy Towey’s farm nearby, a dead calf lies in a trailer. A third of his cattle have had to be treated for pneumonia. Producing a vet’s bill, he says he can’t afford to pay it, and he has only 10 days of feed left because hundreds of bales have been destroyed. His cut turf is saturated. If the water rises another 12 inches – which he fears will happen, as waters continue to rise even as he stands there talking – his cattle will drown, unless something is done. And yet, he says helplessly, nobody is doing anything.
“Ten days ago, the water started coming into the houses,” says Towey, who has slept only four nights in a dry bed, offered by four different friends, in the past week. “My livelihood is gone. I don’t know what to do or where I’m going. I have no options. The Irish Farmers’ Association are advising me to sell the cattle and go – no one will buy the land. This has got to stop. The human suffering is too much. It can’t be allowed to go on. It’s unbelievable.”
Towey’s house, a former post office, has never flooded before so, 18 months ago, he refurbished it, but he was unable to obtain insurance. He sees his circumstances growing bleaker by the day, despite his efforts to rescue his farm. “The water has risen four inches today because the ESB just released water off the lake,” he says.
During a brief visit to the town by the Taoiseach yesterday, Towey pushed his way through the handlers, not to plead his own case, but to seek help for his aunt, Lucy Egan (85), who was living in her flooded house on the main street until he was finally able to get Health Service Executive (HSE) community respite care for her on Sunday night.
On Tuesday morning, the HSE rang to say they were sending her home, to a house where the water was constantly rising and has reached the level of the windowsills. He was informed that she would have to go to a private nursing home at a cost of €700 per week. After intervention from the IFA’s Michael Silke, the respite care centre has agreed to continue accommodating her and to review her case today.
Farmer Daniel O’Donnell says that 90 per cent of his land nearby is under water and that he has lost 600 bales of feed, and he has no idea how he will feed his cattle between now and next spring. His family’s welfare is at risk and he knows 30-40 families in the same situation. “We have been offered nothing here,” he says.
Exhausted after 10 days of emergency work with farmers, Silke’s face reddens and tears come to his eyes as he says: “The human suffering is being replicated all the way up and down the Shannon” on hundreds of farms. “We are at breaking point. We can take no more. I’ve spent 10 years trying to get something done and, apart from a pilot project in 2007, where as far as I could see they took a few rotten trees from the Shannon, there has been nothing done.”
He believes the cause of the flooding is that the Shannon, which he says has become silted with billions of tons of peat from the run-off of Bord na Móna bogs, is not being properly managed by the six bodies that are jointly responsible for it: “If the waters were properly managed in the three lakes, we would not have the flooding we are having at the minute.”
About 60km (37 miles) away in Skehanagh, Peterswell, near Gort, stranded farmer Michael Morgan (62), who lives alone, has been unable for three days to leave the low island on which his house stands, surrounded by water as far as the eye can see.
Neighbours have waded 400m through dangerously rushing water to reach him with food and support, but they have been unable to get food to his cattle because they have been unable to obtain a helicopter to lift bales of hay and drop them, and the route has been too dangerous by boat.
Another 15 farmers are trapped like this in the small area around Gort, which was impassable yesterday, making it impossible for children to get to the schoolhouse only 2km (1.2 miles) away, because to do so would require a 104km round-trip via twisty detours.
The road to Morgan’s house has become a rushing metre-deep river, destroying houses along the way, as run-off from the Slieve Aughty mountains spills into the valley, lifting the black plastic bales of silage like soccer balls and floating them from field to field as it destroys them.
It’s hard to walk against the current on the road, which has become a river. It was dry on Tuesday morning and has never flooded before.
“It happened overnight,” says a shocked Anne Flanagan, whose beautiful seven-year-old house, on land that has never before flooded, is destroyed, and who feared for the lives of her brother and teenage son as they worked through two long nights on Tuesday and Wednesday in an attempt to stave off disaster.
But, by yesterday afternoon, the road had become rapids with a strong current and cascading waterfalls. “We need EU funding to rehouse people. There are six to 10 families in this area alone that are homeless now,” says neighbour Aidan Holland. No State agency has come forward to assess the needs of these homeless people, or to offer support. “We were critical of the US over Hurricane Katrina – but the same thing is happening here,” says Anne. “Thank you for coming here and seeing this. Please tell the world because no one is listening to us.”