“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was much truth in his message but unfortunately the idea of periodic stress being a part of water-adjacent living has been replaced by constant anxiety.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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