"The water came in the front and the back of the house and rose two feet up the wall, " said Driver, who lives in Millmount Avenue, Drumcondra beside the River Tolka, which had just burst its banks. "I had to leave the house but I came back after 10 days because a few houses along the street had been broken into."

He was ultimately forced to live in the attic for months as his entire ground floor had to be taken up. "Fair play to Bertie. He told everybody to leave the debris out on the street and he would arrange to have it collected, " said Driver.

"I did some of the repair work myself and finished the day after Paddy's Day . . . at a final cost of 56,000."

One of the problems was that when the waters began to subside after 24 hours, a wall across the river prevented the waters draining back into the river. "A man who had a JCB drove it down and knocked down the wall himself. That helped, " Driver recalls.

Driver had no complaints about insurance, which covered everything. "The excess payment was increased in the first year but it has since come back down, " he said. By February 2003, the Red Cross, at the instruction of the government, gave humanitarian aid of 6,500 to those with insurance and 10,000 to those without. But Driver was critical of contractors working for the ESB who, he claimed, charged every house 60 to 100 to turn the electricity back on.

Not so lucky with insurance was Maura Derwin, who owns the corner shop just down the road from Driver. "The insurance company won't insure the shop against loss arising from flooding since the 2002 floods, " she says. "We lost a lot of stock . . . beer, cigarettes, groceries . . . and we had to shut down for two weeks. It was a frightening experience."

Derwin is, however, confident that the building up of the walls along the Tolka and the raising of the ground level in the parks on either side means that the frightening events of 2002 are unlikely to be repeated.