It is the disappearing lake that has stopped disappearing.
Lough Funshinagh in the west of Ireland used to drain through a “swallow hole”, as if someone had pulled the plug in a bath, but for an unknown reason nature’s plumbing has broken down, flooding an area thought to be twice the lake’s usual size and threatening homes and livelihoods.
Last week, Roscommon county council halted work to drain the lake artificially with a 2.5-mile (4km) pipeline to the nearby River Shannon after the campaign group Friends of the Irish Environment took the local authority to the high court on the grounds that no environmental impact assessment had been carried out, breaching EU rules.
A high court order halting the flood relief has set off a bitter row, with some local residents arguing that Ireland’s scientists and political leaders would be pulling out all the stops to find a solution if it were homes in coastal Dublin that were under threat.
Mary Beattie’s home has been surrounded by industrial-sized sandbags for more than a year and her garden has partially flooded. “There are even life belts here,” the 69-year-old said, pointing to her submerged farmland. “Did you ever see anything like it?”
Beattie said she would move on to the top of floor of her house if it became inundated.
With flood relief now at a standstill, local residents say they have been abandoned and that far from being protected, the environment has been damaged by inaction. Rare Bewick’s and whooper swans, curlews and the unusual fauna supported by the seasonal waters have all disappeared.
“The law is the winner here, nobody else,” said Geraldine Murray, who lives locally.. She remembered scores of swans nesting on the shores when she was a child. Now they are gone, as are the geese, and other wildlife.
Standing on what looks like a mangrove thicket in the waters inundating his farm, Tom Carney said the flooding was “an awful affliction” for the community.
“The sad thing is nobody knows what happened,” the 70-year-old said. “Whether it is because of climate change or a collapse in the underground caverns or some obstruction that has got in the way, nobody knows.”
Funshinagh is one of the largest turloughs in Ireland and is officially considered “of major ecological importance” and a Priority 1 habitat under EU law. It is served by both surface water during heavy rainfall and groundwater through springs bubbling up from the karst limestone bedrock.
While it hasn’t vanished fully to bone dry land since 1996, a crisis set in after heavy rain in 2016 caused flooding that has failed to recede.
Carney said he remembered when the lake used to slowly drain dry, disappearing down the swallow hole and making a whirlpool-like noise as the last water disappeared underground.
According to the International Association of Hydrogeologists (pdf), the water level rose by 2 metres above normal levels in 2016, causing extensive and prolonged flooding. “Based on the slow outflow, it was calculated that it would take 600 days or two years for the floodwaters to drain and that would assume no further flood events,” the IAH said in a 2018 report.
Farmers in the area do not want the lake to drain completely, but fear the situation for the habitat and their homes will worsen if after a relatively dry winter they are faced with another deluge next winter. Septic tanks will be flooded, sending effluent into what has been recognised as some of the cleanest lake water in the country, they said.
“Us farmers, we just want it to regulate itself, we just want to protect the environment like we did before with respect and dignity to all the natural wildlife,” said Bernadette Mee, pointing to acres of decades-old ash and native larch killed by the flooding on her farm.
She like Murray and Carney say the irony is the habitat the EU law is designed to protect has been destroyed.
This time of the year, the air above the shoreline should be filled with feathers and the chitter-chatter of birds, Mee said. “The birds you hear are behind you, they are not on the lough, there are no swans, no geese on the lough, there’s nothing. The reed beds are gone, they have no cover.”
Mee said that before 2016, the water was difficult to see such was the expanse of rushes and reed beds. The vegetation supported swans by giving them cover and because they could feed off the tadpoles and nutrients on the lake floor.
Roscommon county council said it had “left no stone unturned trying to find a mechanism to deliver urgent emergency relief that would ensure families could stay in their homes”, but added that it had been questioned every step of the way by Friends of the Irish Environment.
Eoin Brady, a lawyer for campaign group, said the council had twice “sought to approve a project to abstract a very significant volume of water” from a protected habitat without conducting environmental assessments, as legally required to do.
“If Roscommon County Council had proceeded as they had originally intended by undertaking a lawful scheme, it is entirely possible that flood relief measures would be in place by now at Lough Funshinagh. There is an important lesson for public authorities from the outcome of these legal proceedings that, in dealing with the impacts of climate change, the longest way around is usually the shortest way home,” he said.
