It was an unsettling feeling as we splashed through the floods while squeezed on the back of a tractor’s trailer, looking out at homes and farms under water. That was two weeks ago when Minister Simon Coveney, farmers, politicians and members of the media spent a couple of hours being driven around the flooded outskirts of Athlone.

What made it so unsettling was to see people wading out from their homes to meet us, as if to perform in front of us with our microphones and our cameras. Desperation etched on their faces, their dignity had also been washed away with the floods as they asked for help.

There has been plenty of coverage of the flooding since Christmas and sometimes media organisations have to make a call on when it’s too much. Like it or not, in this era of 24-hour rolling news and social media, viewers, readers and listeners can become bored easily. And so, as happens, the shock factor soon passes once all the hard-luck stories have been told by poor, unfortunate householders, farmers and business owners whose lives have been turned upside down by the storms.

As I sat into my car to drive back to a dry house in Dublin, I couldn’t help but think that when the news focus moves to the next big story, these people remain filling sandbags and minding pumps. Even if the sun shines every day, it is going to be months before these homes and farmlands are dried out. Yet, to the wider public, it’s yesterday’s news. That fear (being out of sight, out of mind) was expressed to those of us on that trailer.

“When ye are all gone, we’ll still be here up to our knees in water ’til May Day.”

True, the general election and the 1916 Rising will bloat the news headlines between now and Easter Monday, while the horror for these people will continue into early summer at least. Just because it is not headline news any more doesn’t mean that the situation has improved for the flood victims.

Met Eireann has taken to naming storms. If complacency out of the media limelight doesn’t set in and the promised measures put in place – there seems so much to be done along the Shannon – we may well have reached storms Tagan, Venom or Wendy before homes, businesses and farms are completely safe from flooding in the future.

Irish beef - the best-loved beef in the world

With me were two Australians, an American, two Canadians, two Belgians, an Englishman living in the French-speaking part of Canada, a woman from Scotland, a Kiwi, an Italian and another man from Northern Ireland. This was last week in Berlin. We had just been to the Green Week food fair but we left hungry and were looking for somewhere to eat. We stumbled on an Argentine steakhouse owned by a Moroccan man who grew up in Italy. He had a great welcome for us. The menu presented a plethora of meat options. No surprise there – we were in a steakhouse, after all, an Argentine steakhouse in Germany owned by a Morroccan Italian. So, how about the beef, chief? “I can tell you that the steak is terrific. It’s Angus steak from Ireland”. Ireland? Not Argentina? How right he was. You’d carve it with a spoon. My very satisfied international posse of colleagues toasted me. I gladly accepted their congratulations on behalf of our farmers back home. So, there you go. Misleading labelling actually works both ways.