Much has been written about the scale of damages experienced in Midleton and other east Cork towns as a result of Storm Babet in October 2023. Estimates put the damage at almost €200 million.
The personal toll on the town’s residents is harder to quantify.
“It doesn’t turn off. You don’t get more than 30 minutes without thinking about the flood,” says Midleton resident Caroline Leahy. “It’s the F-word that’s barred in our house. You don’t mention the F-word”.
Leahy lives in Tír Cluain, a Celtic Tiger housing estate that appears much like any other. Rows of neat semidetached homes lined shoulder to shoulder, adorned with hedges and young trees. Look closer and you’ll spot a few things amiss.
Sandbags perch alongside front doors. A fine layer of silt coats the tarmac. And most bizarrely, a construction site fence rests awkwardly along the remains of a crumbled concrete wall.
[ Storm Babet: A slow-moving train of rain hit Ireland. The results were disastrousOpens in new window ]
This estate was an epicentre of carnage when Babet hit, resting along a key bend in the Owenacurra river on the edge of the worst-hit town. A month’s worth of rain fell in less than 24 hours, causing the waterway to burst its banks and almost completely submerge Midleton.
“It was really by the luck of God that someone didn’t die on that day. It came so fast with no warning, and it was so deep,” says Leahy. “A car from the house behind me actually floated out of their driveway and went past my house.”
Her home was devastated by the flood, with mucky water rising to 4ft within a quarter of an hour, causing €86,000 worth of damage to walls, furniture, appliances, flooring and electrics.
[ In pictures: Storm Babet brings heavy rain and flooding to IrelandOpens in new window ]
The silver lining was that she and her partner had home insurance with flood protection. But after Babet, she was told this policy was no longer available.
“Obviously enough, flood cover is the one thing we need,” she says. “We shopped around trying to find it from elsewhere, but no one would give me a quote for any insurance, even excluding flood cover.”
However painful her experience of flooding was, the fact that she is now unable to secure insurance has turned every weather warning or instance of heavy rain into a dread-infused panic.
[ The Uninsurables: One in 20 Irish houses struggles to get flood insuranceOpens in new window ]
“We don’t have €90,000 sitting around. If we flood again, we’re homeless, like,” she says, adding that it’s the same for 600 properties across east Cork.
The town is now in “crisis”, she says because so few have been able to maintain their flood insurance after Babet. It would be like winning the lottery if they could get it back.
A self-described blow-in from Cork city, Leahy bought the house in 2015 with her partner, after an engineer gave them the all-clear.
“When we bought I obviously spotted the river, and asked them: ‘Are we at any risk of flooding from that river?’ They said: ‘No, no, no, that site’s been elevated purposely so you’re at no risk,‘” she says.
“From speaking to local people who grew up around here all their lives, they’d tell me they used to swim in this field when they were kids. You presume the planning department is rigorous enough to check that beforehand, but that’s where we are.”
A lot of people think: ‘Oh, it’s just water, you can just clean it up’. But no, it’s really traumatic actually
— Caroline Leahy
She says local politicians have no appetite to get involved in insurance policies, seeing it as intervening with commercial entities, but she thinks the Government could introduce regulation to help the situation.
A model similar to the Motor Insurers’ Bureau of Ireland, which compensates victims of uninsured drivers, could serve as a useful template for how newly uninsurable homes could be covered, she says.
“I’m a real believer in where there’s a problem, there’s a solution, if somebody is willing to find it. And that’s what it comes down to,” she says.
Two-and-a-half kilometres south, Midleton House is perched along the banks of the tidal Dungourney river, the second waterway of the town, facing the famous distillery. Owners Noreen and Liam Motherway have been there for 33 years, but they’d never seen anything like the speed and might of Babet.
“It did €100,000 worth of damage,” Noreen says, flicking through reams of photos on her phone showing the listed building being partially washed away.
The floodwater surged down the main street and up their driveway, carving a metre-cubed hole in the front garden and coursing through the house. It ate into paint and plaster, destroyed much of their furniture and left a thick coating of sludge in its wake.
A small dehumidifier hums in the corner of the sittingroom, while the ends of their curtains remain upturned – signs of the devastation caused.
“We’re living in terror,” she says. Her husband nods alongside her. “Because it’s going to come again. There’s been nothing done to prevent it”.
The Motherways were without flood insurance when the waters came, having lost their policy after Storm Frank in 2015, so the financial implications of Babet were enormous for the couple.
“It came up to the glass there,” she says, gesturing to a nearby window. “It was up to 4ft. And all caused by neglect.”
Noreen points the finger at a lack of action from the council, which has been talking about flood relief measures since 2015’s Storm Frank, but has been sluggish in its actions to date.
“The only practical things they’ve done are [installing] gauges in the river, which is kind of academic, moving gravel from two areas of the river, and cutting overhanging branches, which is Mickey Mouse stuff,” says Liam.
If it takes that length of time to put a little flood gate outside our door, where are we going with the rest of the big project?
— Noreen Motherway
In the wake of the flood, the Government introduced two financial schemes for residents to deal with property damage. The first is the Humanitarian Assistance Scheme (HAS), which aims to compensate uninsured homeowners for damage caused by severe weather.
However, it is only valid for works to bring the property into a liveable state, rather than providing full compensation. And on top of that, it is means-tested, meaning the Motherways, and many more people, were only eligible to get a fraction of the costs back.
The second is the Individual Property Protection (IPP) scheme, which will install slot-in flood barriers at the doors of eligible properties at the State’s expense. Applications for this scheme closed in November.
First deliveries of the IPP floodgates to east Cork are expected this month, Minister for Public Expenditure Jack Chambers said in a recent Dáil response, but a target completion date for installation was not given.
The minister added that the latest iteration of Cork County Council’s Flood Relief Scheme (FRS), expected to cost in excess of €50 million, should be submitted to An Bord Pleanála early next year and be “substantially complete” by 2031.
But this date draws scepticism from the Motherways, who have seen flood protection timelines drag on for years.
[ Ireland’s flood defences are inadequate, experts warnOpens in new window ]
“If it takes that length of time to put a little flood gate outside our door, where are we going with the rest of the big project?” says Noreen, shaking her head.
Even if the FRS is built, a question mark still hangs over whether it would finally allow homeowners to get flood insurance.
One of its aims is to provide residents and businesses with this protection once again, but a goal is not a guarantee, as locals point out.
And with climate change rewriting the rules underlying weather systems, guarantees are hard to come by when predicting future climate patterns. A warming atmosphere is simply more likely to produce extreme weather and intense rainfall, the science says.
The Motherways have seen this shift at first hand. Plotting out the major floods throughout the history of their home, which was built in the early 19th century, makes for uncomfortable reading.
Before 2015 and 2023, they have to go back nearly a century to 1920 to find another flood that did damage of this scale. And their garden is also seeing increasingly regular flooding now too.
Because of these trends and the significant upheaval caused by Babet, residents are uniting. The Midleton and east Cork Flood Action Group sprang up early last year and now has about 2,000 followers on Facebook.
[ Why was the Storm Babet flooding so bad?Opens in new window ]
Caroline Leahy is its secretary and says the group’s goal is not only to fight for those whose properties have been flooded, but also people in the area who haven’t yet experienced the anguish it inflicts.
“It’s something that I don’t think anyone really fully understands until they’ve gone through it,” she says.
“It’s horrific. A lot of people think: ‘Oh, it’s just water, you can just clean it up’. But no, it’s really traumatic actually. And you lose things that no insurance fund can pay back, sentimental stuff that you simply can’t replace.”
