One Friday night recently when I walked Drumcondra's redbrick streets they was like a scene from a 1950s B-movie where a bomb has killed the populace but left the buildings intact. The torrent of water that burst down Millmount Avenue the previous night had receded, but every house was abandoned, with street-lights extinguished and cars dumped haphazardly in the centre of the road. On Millmount Terrace the river wall had been bulldozed to allow the rampaging water to escape.
Personally I was lucky, living on high ground above the flood line. But these homes - many of elderly people, crammed with cherished possessions built up over a lifetime - were ruined. The only person I met - a young man with two dogs - said it might take six months before he could live in his house again. He had spent the previous night upstairs but the water in the rooms below had rendered his house so cold it was impossible to stay.
Normality
People have returned in the weeks since, though the piles of ruined furniture and water-soiled electrical appliances being carted away are testament to how long it will take the area to return to normal. But one small element of normality returned to Drumcondra last Monday, haltingly at first with a floodlight failure. Then the lights came on properly in Tolka Park and Shelbourne emerged from wrecked dressing rooms and offices beneath the new stand onto a pitch which during the floods had been covered by five feet of water.
The concerns of football are minor compared with what many locals lost, but it was heartening to see the skyline lit again by floodlights when at one stage it seemed that, after a hundred turbulent years, Shelbourne could go out of existence because of flood damage which might have cost a million euro to repair.
Richmond Road bears proof that such things happen in football. In the glare of the floodlights I examined a club crest with the words: "Founded in 1924". Yet this crumbling wooden crest wasn't attached to Tolka Park, but to a makeshift hut in the field opposite it, where the once great Drumcondra FC ply their trade.
And Drumcondra was not even the first team to play in Richmond Road. On what was virtually a country road, Frankfurt FC battled there during the inaugural (1921) League of Ireland season, which they did not survive - presumably being cannibalised by hungry Rovers fans.
But in the years after their 1927 fairytale FAI Cup Final victory as a non-league team, Drumcondra FC reigned supreme. Admittedly, they were in such terminal decline on my first visit to Tolka Park in 1969 that a public announcement urged anybody present connected with the club and in possession of football boots to contact the dressing-room immediately.
Vagabonds
But they were still lords of Richmond Road and their then tenants, Shelbourne, were the vagabonds of Dublin football - the only senior team without a home. Possibly this made me fall in love with them, understanding, even at nine years of age, that following a team was an exercise more in stoicism than enjoyment.
Stoicism was tested in the following years as Shelbourne became the wilderness team, playing to derisory crowds in the desolation of Harold's Cross dog track. It took the appearance of an overweight, bored George Best (in a fleeting cameo for Shelbourne's opponents, Cork Celtic) to nudge the attendance to 5,000 one Sunday in 1976.
All 5,000 turned up for the opening of a Shelbourne drinking club in Mary Street that same night, a brief and infamous episode to be passed over in silence.
In 1980 Shelbourne not only finished last in the league, but suffered first-round knockouts in every cup competition (including 1-0 to Dublin University in the Leinster Senior Cup). Matt Talbot endured only half as much humiliation, yet Ollie Byrne has never been put forward for canonisation. By 1986 they were relegated and on the verge of becoming an obscure vanished cult, like a lost rain-forest tribe. Then, like a phoenix, the club's fortunes changed with the purchase of Tolka Park, followed in 1992 with a first league title in 30 years.
Fractious
Dublin soccer has a history of being fraught and fractious ever since the 1922 final between Shamrock Rovers and St James's Gate when Rovers fans rioted after the final whistle and broke into the James's Gate dressing room. Order was restored only when an IRA volunteer who played for James's Gate produced a revolver and threatened to shoot any Rovers fan interrupting their celebrations. Naturally I thoroughly disapprove of such threats because, like most Shelbourne supporters, I think shooting is too good for Rovers fans.
Yet even they have turned up to help out in Tolka Park since the floods as the club got itself together with the stoicism of a survivor.
Shels won their homecoming match 2-0. A thing of beauty it was not, but there was a quietly celebratory feel to the occasion. Let's hope it was the first of many happy homecomings around Richmond Road in the months to come.