River Run

by Patrick J. Heneghan (The Meandering Milesian)

The River Dodder in quieter times

What are the chances of seeing all the rivers of the County and City of Dublin simultaneously running overground?  Not just the obvious ones, like the Liffey, the Tolka and the Dodder, but ALL of them.  What are the chances of having two children in a family having the same birth dates, as in our case, August 25th?  What are the chances of these astronomical sets of odds coming together?  Maybe about the same as having a bet on a long-odds winner of the Grand National coupled with a bet on a long-odds winner of the Derby.  Maybe higher!  I leave it to the  mathematicians to supply the answers.

Which brings me to 25th August 1986.  The younger of our two birthday children, Padraic, was celebrating his 21st. We were living in Templeogue in South County Dublin, between the River Dodder and the River Poddle.  Nothing would do “She Whose Word is Law” but to book the eight of us who comprised the family for a meal and a show that very night in a hotel in Portmarnock, where one Anne Bushnell was presenting a cabaret entitled  “A Night with Edith Piaf”.  

One does not like using the “p” word in polite family literature, but that is the word that comes to mind to describe how the rain performed all that particular day, from early morning until after midnight.  The non-stop rain was combined with a hurricane called “Charlie”.  It was a working day in Dublin, so the plan was that we should set off for Portmarnock in two groups of four each, shortly after 6 o’clock that evening.  The male members of our entourage, quite unchivalrously, were to go in the family car, probably because that side of the family would include Padraic, the “Birthday Boy”, who was 21 on that day, as well as his younger brother, who was only 13 at the time.  The female group, the three girls (the eldest of whom, Clare, shared the birth date with the main celebrant) with Mom in charge, were to go downtown on the bus to Sutton, and then go to Portmarnock by the DART (our very efficient electrified rail system, the Dublin Area Rapid Transport service).

I had assured the train-goers that they would get the DART the whole way to Portmarnock from Sutton.  Wrong!  The DART finished its northside run in Howth Junction, where the girls found themselves stranded at 7 o’clock that evening, short of their destination by several miles. While standing around on the Howth Junction station for about several minutes, debating what to do next,  “Charlie” was pretty merciless and they got pretty thoroughly soaked.  Failing to find a phone, they looked across a rain-swept stretch of green adjoining the station, to a neat row of redbrick houses in the distance.  They decided there was nothing for it but to make a dash to the nearest house and beg for the use of a phone, price no object.  This involved crossing a footbridge about 25 feet above the railway line.  In later recounting the event they said that, with the aid of “Charlie” sweeping up from beneath, they gave a passable quadruple imitation of Marilyn Monroe in the film sequence where her skirt billows up around her waist over the subway vent. Like drowned rats, mascara streaming down their cheeks, and hair-dos converted into rats’ tails, they rang the bell at the first house they reached, hoping for the best.

The door was opened by one of those old-style ladies who still believed in the “Ireland of the Welcomes” legend.  She insisted that they all come in and sort themselves out.  She provided cups of tea all round, and - even more welcome - an electric hair drier whereby they were able to dry their hair.  She even encouraged them to give their outer clothing a quick run over.  This charitable soul then telephoned for a taxi to take the quartet to Portmarnock.

Meanwhile, unaware of the fix the other half of the family was in, thanks to my monumental piece of misinformation, our male quartet reached the Portmarnock Hotel and made ourselves comfortable.  Making due allowance for possible peak-hour delays on the DART, I eventually set out by the car for Portmarnock railway station, which was about a mile away, to meet the incoming half of the family.  It was only then that I found that the DART did not come as far as Portmarnock.  Commuters there still relied on the occasional northbound diesel train from the city. After waiting at the station for about 30 minutes, I returned to the hotel in the hope that there would be a telephone message to explain the non-arrival of the rest of the entourage. No phone call!  I was on my way to the station for a second time when I was flagged down from an oncoming cab by the gesticulations of a group of irate females.  Ten minutes later, the very bedraggled party of would-be revellers entered the hotel.

The meal that followed was excellent, and Anne Busnell did her best to bring Edith Piaf to life, but it was not a night to remember in the accepted sense for such occasions.  With one half of our group sitting all night in damp clothes, I, the driver of the family car, tried not to think about the pending task of driving over gale-lashed and flooded roads along the north to south axis of the  County and City of Dublin. It was a relief of sorts when the hotel manager announced that the content of the cabaret was being curtailed on account of the weather, in deference to patrons who might have to travel some distance, and might wish to leave early.

As I drove from the parking lot, with five passengers in the back seat and three in the front, I did my best to revive my hazy memory of where exactly the many small rivers in the north of county Dublin were, and at what points it might be the best to try to cross them, in order to reach the more familiar territory south of our landmark river, the Liffey. I knew we would have to negotiate the Mayne River and the Santry River, and I am sure we crossed them at some point, but, truth to tell, it was hard for the first few miles to say where the roads ended and the rivers began.  After many reversing, diversions and manoeuvrings, we eventually got to the Swords Road, and I found to my relief that the River Tolka bridge at Drumcondra, which had a notorious history of heavy flooding, was still holding out, as indeed was O’Connell Bridge over the River Liffey.  With a sense of relief, we made our way around by St. Patrick’s Cathedral and sped up Clanbrassil Street.

The big surprise of the night was the River Poddle, an insignificant tributary of the River Liffey which spends most of its life in a culvert underground. That night it had decided to stage a resurrection.  We had hoped to make the last mile of our journey home by taking the right fork at Harold’s Cross Park and going along the Lower Kimmage Road.  But there was no Lower Kimmage Road to be seen that night!  The Poddle, in all its glory, was pouring down from Kimmage.  Front lawns were awash and garden walls had long been toppled.  By taking the left of the fork Harold’s Cross Park, we managed to make it as far as Terenure, where we fully expected to find the River Dodder coming against us down the Rathfarnham Road.  At that stage the Dodder banks were still holding fast, and we arrived on our doorstep in Templeogue at 1 a.m.

But the night was not yet over.  Our eldest son decided to take out his bicycle and inspect the Dodder from the Austin Clarke Bridge just above Templeogue Village, to see how the River Dodder was performing there. He returned breathless about ten minutes later, urging us to come to the bridge to witness the most fantastic flood he had ever seen. We took out the car again, and the sight of the river was indeed spectacular!  The bridge, a recently constructed one, was awash.  The water coming down from the Tallaght direction was filling the arch of the bridge to within an inch of the soffit.  On the lower side of the bridge, the force of the flood hitting a depression in the riverbed was producing a column of water which was peaking above eye-level aas we stood on the bridge.  I had never seen Niagara Falls, but if it is as impressive as the River Dodder was in the small hours of that morning in August 1986, it would be worth the price of the trip!  

But the River Dodder was not contained that night throughout its whole course.  A bridge was swept away at Ballsbridge nearer to its mouth, and many homes were flooded.  The newspapers on 26th August told how one of the century’s worst storms had damaged houses in Dublin and Bray, and ruined crops in Kilkenny, Tipperary and Wexford. A number of people died and over a thousand people had had to be evacuated from their homes.

We have lived now for over forty years on a street between the Dodder and the Poddle, and have on occasion since 1986 been visited or stopped on the street by anxious prospective house buyers about the history of the two rivers.  As I write, more than a decade later and even after an unusually wet summer, the Dodder is quietly bubbling along, well within its banks. The course of the Poddle is even more difficult to trace now, the river having suffered the indignity since 1986 of having had its bed extensively excavated, redesigned and reculverted.  And “Charlie” is now remembered only as the name of a one-time prominent politician of the 1980s, who likewise has virtually disappeared from public view.