Night of the Big Wind

Last night’s storm may have left 5,000 homes without electricity and damaged some city centre roofs, but that’s nothing compared to the infamous 1839 Oíche na Gaoithe Móire. It was a hurricane that unexpectedly swept over Ireland on 6th of January, causing complete carnage in the process. Almost a quarter of North Dublin homes were badly damaged - in Turtle Bunbury's words, it "made more people homeless in a single night than all the sorry decades of eviction that followed it". More than 40 ships were destroyed and anywhere between 250 and 800 people were killed.

Bunbury explains "many more must have succumbed to pneumonia, frostbite or plain old depression in its wake. Those bankrupted by the disaster included hundreds who had stashed their life savings up chimneys and in thatched roofs that disappeared in the night".

Hurricane Charley

Even those who weren’t yet born on August 20th 1986 have probably heard-tell of Hurricane Charley, one of the most infamous Irish storms in living memory. Although it was downgraded to ‘extratropical cyclone’ rather than hurricane status before hitting these isles, Charley still battered both Ireland and the UK and was responsible for at least 11 deaths.

In Ireland, it set the record for most rainfall in one day, with 200mm measured at Kippure. Dublin and Wicklow were worst hit with flooding, with 1,000 people evacuated when Bray’s River Dargle overflowed.

October 2011

I’m sure we can all remember this one. Torrential rain caused serious floods along the east coast of the country, again mostly in Dublin and Wicklow. As one of the first major Irish storms to have been captured on camera phones, the most memorable images were of Dundrum Town Centre, where major leaks and drainage failures led to the shopping centre being evacuated in the middle of particularly violent flash floods:

June 1963

Poor Dundrum, eh? Serious thunderstorms also struck Dublin 50 years ago, leading to drivers (cars & carts) struggling to make their way through waterlogged roadways. Some clever locals even used their boats to navigate the suburban Dublin streets. Met Eireann write “while it was impossible to verify the accuracy of these measurements (and the exposure of the sites would not have been meteorologically acceptable) the general consistency of the data within the area suggested that local rainfall totals probably exceeded 150mm. The intensity of the rainfall was also remarkable: at Mount Merrion at least 75mm of rain fell in one hour.”

Luckily, Helen Carroll has managed to upload some rare footage of the floods to YouTube: