Storms have always been part of our weather story

Country Living with Francis Farragher

We’re entering into another of our wet and windy periods when the Atlantic weather systems seem to have taken pretty sure aim for our western shores, and not for the first time either over recent years, decades and even centuries.

The West Coast took a fair old battering this time last year, with many areas of coastal Connemara and the islands bearing the brunt of the Atlantic fury, as a solid month or so of storms, rained in on top of us.

It was only last week while watching an RTE One weather special, that I realised the severity of Storm Darwin in the run-up to Valentine’s Day last year.

Darwin struck on February 12, and with particular ferocity along the Clare coastline, where the village of Lahinch took an exceptionally vicious battering with pavements and roadways rooted up and business premises destroyed.

All the long term weather warnings cum quackery of recent months have been concentrating on the feared big freeze that would visit our lands in the aftermath of Christmas, but I think the greater likelihood is for the storms to arrive.

Darwin was a particularly vicious weather systems bringing the strongest gust of wind recorded in Shannon for 68 years of almost 160kph (nearly 100mph). The amateur video footage of a Limerick boathouse roof being stripped in a matter of seconds by Darwin is quite spectacular.

And while most of us tend to look back pretty fondly on 2014 as a generally benign year, memory does tend to play a trick or two, in terms of under-estimating the buffeting we got during last January and February.

Storm force winds occurred on two other days in February – the 1st and the 8th – while galeforce winds were recorded on 23 days of the month. This had followed on from a particularly stormy January period with the Met. Eireann station at Connemara’s Mace Head recording winds of up to 141kph or 87mph on the 25th day of the month, the highest since the station began its automatic recording in 2007.

Those storms do probably pale in comparison though to the night of January 6, 1839, when 175 years ago, the country was ravaged in what we all know now as the Night of the Big Wind or Oíche na Gaoithe Móire, although with no reliable recording equipment available, its true ferocity can never be scientifically quantified.

Newspaper accounts of the time, and some research work mainly carried out by Met. Eireann, certainly produce a scary account of the events of the 12th day of Christmas in 1839, with the death tally varying from 90 to over 400. Even the lower figure is a quite scary toll for a storm.

Ireland was of course, to all intents and purposes, a third world country at the time, with houses not nearly as solid as today. Rather sadly, 150 years on from that natural disaster, places like the Philippines and Haiti still have homes of similar frailty, so whenever nature turns violent in those parts, the death toll will be high.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.