“People who live beside a river should expect to get their feet wet now and again.” With these words in August 1986, Noel Carroll, spokesman for Dublin Corporation, caused another storm after Hurricane Charley resulted in the river Dodder overflowing in Ballsbridge. Carroll was a brilliant runner, but his timing on that occasion was regarded as badly off.
There was much truth in his message but unfortunately the idea of periodic stress being a part of water-adjacent living has been replaced by constant anxiety. In the past 30 years in Ireland, there has been a 7 per cent increase in rainfall.
A few months after Carroll responded to the floods in 1986, the Dublin city manager, Frank Feely, wrote to the government: “While theoretically the danger of avoiding damage by flood could be removed by turning the river into a high-walled concrete channel all the way up, I doubt if anyone would be happy with a solution along those lines. We certainly would not.”
Concrete is at the centre of the Irish flooding dilemma, underlined starkly by this week’s Storm Chandra, but it is not the solution. More than 25 years ago, after serious floods, hydrogeologists observing Celtic Tiger Ireland were vocal about the implications of increased suburbanisation and changes in agricultural practices.
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The consequences of lack of proper assessments during the planning process, as well as the decision to build on flood plains of rivers, were becoming apparent. In relation to south Galway, it was reported in this newspaper in 2000 that “County councillors who thought they were doing people favours by pushing through Section 4 motions directing that permission be granted for this or that bungalow were, as things turned out, visiting untold suffering on their constituents. Flood risk assessment simply did not arise.”
Another problem highlighted was deeper digging of marginal agricultural land to improve its usefulness; this created “fast tracks” for storm water which just made its way to the nearest river, stream or lake.
The National Roads Association was surprised at that time by the flooding of the M4 in Kildare, near Maynooth. “The area around Maynooth is very flat and quite a lot of housing development has taken place there since the motorway was built, which wouldn’t have helped,” said its spokesperson. “But what happened at the weekend was exceptional and all we can do is hope that it won’t happen again.”
The danger of living in “hope” in relation to flooding is obvious given the scale of climate change. It is as useful as the assertion a decade ago of Independent TD Danny Healy-Rae: “God above is in charge of the weather, and we here can’t do anything about it.”
The Climate Research Centre in Maynooth, Icarus, noted in 2018 that “Ireland is the wettest it has been in more than 300 years”. Flooding events are now an annual occurrence. As environmental journalist John Gibbons put it in his book The Lie of The Land last year, “the rest of this century will be a rolling battle to hold back water, be it from rising sea levels, violent storm surges or increasingly intense downpours. In many cases, this will involve a staged retreat from areas that are impossible or simply too expensive to defend.”
Another key message of his book is that delaying investment in climate-change adaptation now will lead to a much heavier price. Intense flooding has the capacity to sink us in more ways than one, and that requires innovative responses.
Trinity College Dublin Geographer Mary Bourke spoke powerfully on RTÉ during the week about nature-based solutions to this crisis. A paper she authored with botanist Marcus Collier in 2020 emphasised the merits of a green infrastructure approach as a “key engineering as well as societal solution” regarding riverside areas and flood alleviation. It highlights the merits of a “scaling-out” of nature-based solutions to complement engineering and technical solutions. They cite one example of the extension of the Luas line being accompanied by embedding street trees in extensive pits to lessen the effect of storm water on the line. Also mentioned are vegetated buffer zones in riverside areas and constructed wetland for run-off management.
[ Facing hell and high water: The parts of Ireland threatened by rising floodwatersOpens in new window ]
What are termed “hard engineering solutions”, such as mechanised channel clearance and building defence embankments, cannot be exclusively relied on. There is no shortage of flood plans from the Office of Public Works, which liaises with the Environmental Protection Agency and local authorities to identify natural water retention measures that can also benefit biodiversity, but they need greater range and urgency.
Bourke emphasised this week the importance of community consultation and collaboration, which align with the assertion of leading climatologist John Sweeney that “decisions on how to cope with climate change ultimately have to be made at local level”. Working with nature will have to be a core part of that.
