Remembering the morning when Debbie came to town

Country Living with Francis Farragher

Fifty-five years ago, almost to the day (Saturday, Sept. 16, 1961), we had a most unwelcome visitor from the Atlantic when Hurricane Debbie called to our shores. She left a trail of havoc and destruction in her wake and to this day Debbie is the only fully accredited hurricane to hit Ireland. Quite miraculously there were no deaths in Galway with Debbie but across the island of Ireland the storm led to 18 fatalities

When Debbie made landfall on that Saturday morning 55 years ago, she still had hurricane speeds (73mph and over) and along the way she produced the strongest gust ever recorded in Ireland – 113mph at Malin Head in Donegal. She also brought us our lowest ever pressure recorded in Ireland, 961.4 hectopascals, and since then there have been remarkable tales of Debbie’s intensity.

Cocks of hay and stacks of oats were lifted from haggards and transported into faraway fields; roads were blocked with fallen trees; while the salt water from the Atlantic burnt fields many miles inland. In terms of weather events, Debbie stands alongside the night of January 6, 1839 – The Night of the Big Wind – a storm that is thought to have cost hundreds of lives across the country.

The Night of the Big Wind was quite possibly a hurricane too but it came before the times when weather information was recorded in Ireland and put into the statistics book. Even back in 1961, weather news was far sparser that it is today. Much and all as we gripe now about weather forecasts not always being correct, they are now loaded with information and warnings of impending storms.

Back then though, the only credible source of weather information came via Radio Éireann, but if that forecast was missed on the previous evening, there was nothing to prepare the masses for what was to come.

In the Connacht Tribune of the following week – September 22, 1961, the atmosphere of Debbie was captured: “The older folk were trying to recall stories of that 1839 storm to find a comparison but no one could remember anything quite so devastating and there are no records of comparable storm damage anywhere previously in the country.”

That edition of The Tribune contained many colourful stories of courage and humour too. A Denny Murphy from Headford ‘saved the day’ for two American tourists on the way to Ashford Castle when, with his ‘powered chainsaw’, he cut a path through 13 ‘man sized trees’. Under the heading of ‘close shaves’, a Roscommon solicitor, Mr. O’Keeffe with the impressive initials of T.J.C., had ‘the skin taken off the top of his nose’, compliments of a falling slate from a nearby roof.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.