From Flood Damage To Desert Plains

We’re awash. As I write, floodwaters are washing through kitchens and parlours across a swathe of the country south of Dundalk. But it’s been like this before, and bad enough for the Government to set up a series of task forces and a consultation process. So, you ask, why’s it happening again?

I suppose it’s because, apart from Bertie’s backyard, not a lot was done. And insofar as anything was, county councils attempted to engineer a solution. By this I mean widening rivers, building culverts and channels and the like.
There’s a better way, but I don’t think Irish engineers or local authorities are interested. And it’s as old as we are.
Analysis of the area around the Céide Fields in Mayo reveals that trees absorbed 70% of the rainwater that fell there about 5000 years ago. And just last month the Observer reported that British research confirmed that newly planted strips of trees are amazingly effective in controlling floods.
This ‘discovery’ emerged from a study of recent changes in farming in North Wales. Having decided to reduce the intensity of their land use farmers began to stock hardier sheep, cut back on grazing land and planted more trees to give shelter to the animals.
Noting that their new woodland seemed able to absorb huge amounts of rainwater while the grazed land let the water run off rapidly, they invited scientists from the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Bangor to research what was happening.
The farmers were right. And if their experience was replicated it could make a major contribution to dealing with our flood problems. Question is, will anyone listen?

For all that, we’ve been as preoccupied by events in far drier lands and specifically in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It’s not the re-emergence of Bin Laden, though that’s interesting enough in its own right. Nor is it the ongoing campaign of terror and counter-terror. No, in many ways our interest has been more parochial.
The grisly ordeal of the unfortunate Ken Bigley moved many people in these islands. That, it seems, was the idea. And the Irish Government may have been mistaken in making a number of very public plays and pleas. One understands. Domestic pressures demanded such overt actions.
Now there’s been another kidnapping, this time in Afghanistan. Annette Flanigan from Richill Co Armagh, who was part of a joint UN Afghan team overseeing this month’s presidential election.
I suppose it reminded us of that benighted country. But oddly enough, at exactly the same time, a number of journalists filed from there in mid-October. Very different perspectives were revealed.
One was Carl O’Brien, billed in the Irish Times as ‘Afghanistan’s first Irish tourist since the US-led invasion’. He came as a tourist. He saw the cities, the changes, the welcome, the fear and the destruction of the country’s heritage.
The second was Kathy Sheridan, who wrote about women ‘weighed down in a man’s world’ in the Irish Times. Her view was darker. Although like Burke she records the warmth and hospitality of the people in general, she found the male domination intrusive, omnipresent and offensive. Indeed in closing her article she celebrates her return to the west, to her own turf.
Finally, James Burke wrote about Afghanistan ‘after the ban’ in the Observer magazine. Where Sheridan set the difference between the town and country as regards female roles in the context of women’s subordination, Burke explained them (more sympathetically) in the context of ancient customs and practices.
He added that for many Afghans the Taliban only became a problem when they imposed the strictures of the country on the more liberal people of Kabul. In addition, for all their daft fundamentalist retrogression, they brought security. Many people miss them, not because they are fundamentalists but because people felt safer when they ruled.
It’s an interesting observation and begs many questions.
From our own watery crisis to that of the Central Asian high desert is a long haul. Two worlds, in fact. But the seizure of one of our own has brought that high desert into our sitting rooms along with the floodwaters. We’ll do well to think about it, long and hard.
I’ll be back to this.