+34
Water is arriving in ways our infrastructure and modified landscape can no longer cope with
Fields in Caheragh, Co Cork, were flooded after the River Ilen bursting its banks following Storm Agnes in 2023. Photograph: Andy Gibsonairy 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,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 – theof 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 . Every year, I fear there will be another one. Gordon D’Arcy’s Birdstyle breaks the mould by mixing natural science with imaginative art 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..
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.
, 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.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.
I’ve had many arguments with my husband - but this was the first wearing a harnessBlindboy unmasked: ‘The thing I’m most afraid of is having to work in an office... so now I work in an office’Mean Girls show cancelled mid-performance after power cut at Bord Gáis Energy TheatreGalway Races Ladies’ Day: ‘Colour and style just adds to everything that’s happening on the track’‘Your father’s playing golf in Doonbeg,’ Hennessy goes. ‘While the cat’s away, the mice will fornicate’
Please follow us on Google to support usElla-Mcsweeney Climate-Change Floods Weather-Ireland
Ireland Latest News, Ireland Headlines
Similar News: You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Uber-style fixed fares will remain part of Irish taxi market, says NTATransport authority will not ban fixed-fare model, which is says is allowed for under the regulatory system
Read more »
Alexander Leads Women's Irish Open; Irish Players AdvanceSouth Africa's Casandra Alexander remains in pole position at the KPMG Women's Irish Open after a second-round 66, while Irish players Áine Donegan and Canice Screene secure spots for the weekend's play.
Read more »
Exploring Connection, Grief, and Setting in Recent Irish FictionThe piece examines a new Irish novel that tackles the themes of connection, grief, and fate against the backdrop of a mysterious canal, while reviewing fresh autumn titles, noting the author's mother‑daughter motif, a haunted‑house tale about sisters, and the significance of place in his prize‑winning short story collection Fen set in the English Fens
Read more »
TG4 says progress in gaining editorial control of Nuacht service from RTÉ ‘extremely slow’Irish language broadcaster asks for €11m more funding in Budget 2027
Read more »