View from a forgotten doorstep by the Shannon
I am a plain ordinary doorstep, close to the grassroots along the Shannon, and I fervently hope that ye are enjoying the current general election campaign a helluva lot more than I am.
I have been suffering sorely since last November, and things seem to be getting worse and worse every day since. Bitterly, that is the pure truth.
I’m the class of country doorstep that used to hugely enjoy general elections, because they brought a lot of traffic and excitement to the house behind me.
Even Charlie Haughey stood on top of me once, when he was Minister for Agriculture, and promised the sun, moon and stars to John Joe’s father, Pakie.
Other bigwigs came too, during elections, and walked all over both myself and my friends, the Grassroots, and we relished it all, because since the kids of this house grew up and had to emigrate, John Joe and Maggie have few visitors, except the postman maybe twice a week with brown envelopes, and the long lad with the sad face that reads the ESB meter.
But all is changed for the worse now.
I’m not a whinger at all, but here is my position today.
No politician will doorstep this poor country house — because I am under four feet of dirty water, and have been that way since the second week of December.
Before that, as John Joe and Maggie tried to save the house from the floods, with the help of all the neighbours, I was sandbagged for the most of November, and those sandbags, that failed in the end, are a woeful weight on any ordinary doorstep.
I fear I am cracked on the right hand side.
John Joe and Maggie had to be taken away by boat, for God’s sake, just before Christmas, and I have not seen them since.
The Grassroots tell me that the house behind, now totally destroyed for sure, has no insurance cover on it either, because the insurance companies refused cover after the storms and flooding seven years ago.
All things considered, you can be sure I won’t be feeling the weight of any politicians’ big wet waders on top of me during this election.
Both myself and the Grassroots miss them, even though the Grassroots, being submerged in sludge and mud of every kind for so long, are in an even worse state than I am.
Worse still, a neighbour man came in a boat up the avenue last Wednesday to check that the old house had not been looted (there has been a share of that elsewhere too), and I gathered from his chat with the son along with him that John Joe, God love him, a decent farmer always, has been lying up on a trolley in the Regional Hospital waiting for a bed for more than a week.
The back is at him after all the fruitless efforts to keep the sandbags built up and the pumps running.
I have a feeling I will be lucky to ever feel the soles of his boots atop me again.
He is 81 now, and not the man he was even during the last floods.
Bits and pieces from the flooded hallway behind me sometimes come drifting out through the letterbox in the door.
Would ye believe that a bill for water rates, addressed to Maggie, came floating out yesterday?
That is the pure, harsh truth too.
There are also a few of those old memorial cards that were kept within Maggie’s Sunday prayer book.
It must have been on the hall table and fallen down into the flood.
Several of the ghostly faces with RIP printed under them belong to those who walked over me often in happier and lively times gone by.
They used dance sets on the kitchen floor in the Fifties, and old Pakie was lively on the fiddle.
I saw that Maggie brought it with her when she left in the boat. Maybe one of the grandchildren will play it again in the future. But it surely won’t be heard behind me ever again...
There is a boat coming up the flooded avenue again.
You can bet it isn’t a politician or an insurance agent...
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