Kildare's neighbouring county, Offaly, also experienced inundation on its western fringe on the Shannon callows where farmsteads built on islands of raised land where virtually marooned as the callows flooded. Residents and business people in the tur
lough country of south Galway, in the town of Athlone, and the city of Cork will also have their memories of the onslaught of water
Even for those not directly affected it is one of the enduring features of the human memory that weather events will lodge in the folklore more permanently than other life events. Senior readers of this paper have commented on the floods of the 8th December, 1954.
The midlands generally were badly affected that day and passengers on the Edenderry bus to Dublin only got as far as Celbridge where Liffey floods blocked further progress. Indeed the north Kildare town has a long record of flood incidents.
The ubiquitous Eoghan Corry in his chronicle of key dates in Celbridge's history quotes old sources which relate that in November 1779 the Liffey rose "with an unusual and most alarming swell for the space of three hours, and at nine o'clock was two feet three inches above the greatest height to which it had risen in the memory of man."
Three houses on the east bank were swept away and thirty people rescued by boat. Flooding was to return to Celbridge in 1787 and, more seriously, in 1802 when the bridge was swept away.
Later that century the timber scaffolding for a railway bridge under construction across the Liffey near Brannockstown collapsed under flood pressure and logs were washed downstream. It is said that many a house in Kilcullen was warmed that winter by timbers salvaged from the Liffey banks
Flooding is not the only weather emergency that can strike. Blizzard and snow can also paralyse sections of the country. Many veterans recall the winter of 1947 which brought great disruption. A bus to Dunlavin had to be dug out of snow drifts.
In the west snow piled so high on the old railway line between Charlestown and Tubbercurry that the heroes of the emergency, the railway linesmen, worked for nine hours shovelling snow in desperate conditions, to clear three-quarters of a mile of track.
The story was repeated in the east as well. The ports were frozen, coal could not be imported, and branch lines such as the Naas-Tullow connection had their trains cancelled, never to be fully restored.
In more recent times the blizzard of 1982 has generated its own body of folklore. The snow fell deep in a swathe east of the Wicklow hills. The dual carriageway was blocked on a Friday evening. Truck drivers, commuters, and even the crew of an Army cash escort, found shelter for the night in the former Roadstone factory at Baldonnel.
The Saturday morning brought no respite with cars covered to their roofs on the carriageway and articulated trucks jack-knifed across the centre median. Some Naas bound travellers walked the carriageway to Kill where they got a lift on a tractor the rest of the way. The Irish Air Corps base at Baldonnel was snowed in but Air Corps personnel worked round the clock with their small fleet of helicopters to ferry supplies to isolated communities. Kildare's highest village, Kilteel, was one of the grateful recipients of the Air Corps supply drops.
But as well as causing undoubted hardship weather events can also bring their own stimulus to the imagination. Floods perhaps not, but snow certainly prompts the poetic mind. One of the great scenes in Irish film making comes in the closing moments of John Huston's 'The Dead' – a masterful film interpretation of James Joyce's short story of the same name. The story portrays middle-class social life in the Dublin of the Edwardian era and is set at an Epiphany night dinner party in a house on the frozen Liffey quays.
As the party comes to an end and the guests say their farewells a voice narrates Joyce's evocative closing lines: 'Snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly on the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves.' Certainly the Shannon waves have been mutinous over the past month and, who knows, but snow may again fall softly on the Bog of Allen before this winter is out.
Series No: 156.
