Athenry tops thirty in the sun

IT mightn’t feature on the world calendar of sun hotspots but on Monday last the Costa del Athenry broke new ground with temperatures reaching a record 30.5° Celsius.

The mid-Galway town was hotter than Crete, Barcelona, Lanzarote – and the Californian sun city of San Francisco, where the mercury only touched 22°C.

Athenry’s climb up the temperature charts showed a steady progression rising from 25°C on Friday, to 27°C on Saturday, before breaking the 30°C mark on Monday last, July 18.

According to Met Éireann, our short sojourn into the 30s temperature zone is well and truly over for the present – with the mercury having dropped back to a maximum in the high teens over the past couple of days.

Rain is also on the horizon for the weekend of the All-Ireland football final with Met Éireann predicting a heavy enough pulse of precipitation, probably on Saturday night.

Ireland’s hottest spot on Monday was in Dublin’s Phoenix Park with a temperature of 33°C recorded there at 2.40pm – the highest temperature recorded in Ireland through the 20th and 21st centuries.

This was just 0.3°C below the record all time ‘high’ of 33.3°C on June 26, 1887, at Kilkenny Castle – the previous high of the past two centuries had been at Boora, Co. Offaly, on Tuesday, June 29, 1976: 32.5°C.

Despite its record high temperature on Monday, Athenry wasn’t the hottest spot in Connacht that day – this ‘honour’ fell to Mount Dillon in East Roscommon which had a high of 31.4°C.

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