"What a book a devil's chaplain might write," mused Charles Darwin, "on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low and horribly cruel works of nature!" For me personally, there would be few crueller episodes in those annals than these recent Christmas storms. I knew the young man struck down in Waterville in Co Kerry; I knew his parents and his grandparents, and even his great-grandparents, who would slip me, as a child, a bar of chocolate from their shop at Christmastime. Seed, breed and generation, yes, I knew them all, and my heart goes out to those surviving him this Christmas.
There were, as we now know, two storms, both of which were born in mid-Atlantic to the south-west of Ireland a day or two before they struck. They followed identical paths, one, the more severe, on Christmas Eve, the second on Christmas Day, both moving from Galway Bay towards Belfast, and then across Scotland on towards Scandinavia. We were well warned of their approach by Met Eireann but, of course, a good forecast does not in itself prevent the damage that a major storm can do. On this occasion, they brought us winds gusting to more than 100 m.p.h., many violent thunderstorms to help the wind in causing havoc with our electricity, and personal tragedy of the most horrific kind.
Depressions as intense as these are not at all unusual. Many appear in the North Atlantic every year, but they really only become noteworthy as far as we in Ireland are concerned if they pass close enough for their strong winds to cause destruction. During the summer months, they tend for the most part to follow a track that takes them well to the north of us, but the preferred path of wintertime depressions lies very close to Ireland - so winter storms of this ferocity are not a rarity.
The most recent one comparable to those of this Christmas was probably that of January 6th, 1991. The storm of February 9th, 1988, was also similar in character, and there were several storms in January, 1974, the most vicious of which, on the night of 11th/12th, did more damage than any previous one this century - except, perhaps, for the storm of February 26/27th, 1903, which is remembered as probably the most severe in Irish history.
The fact is that storms have been a fact of life since time began. Some years we get a lot of them; in other years individual storms are particularly vicious; and sometimes we get off lightly for a year or two. But each storm leaves its individual legacy of sorrow.