⚠️ Storm Éowyn - Fri 24.01.25 (**Please read Mod Instruction in OP.**)

Fascinating thought process that leads to the conclusion that city and town dwellers are more supportive of their community than rural dwellers

has that ever been done before 😂

There are plenty of people that move to Dublin because they want to live in a city. How many under the age of 35 want to move to a rural area? Hardly anyone.

I know loads of young people who love living in Dublin. I could count on one hand the numbers that want to move rural and those that do want to make the rural move to be closer to family, but not until they are older.

Farms do indeed provide essential services to the population of ireland, but we have too many of them.

90% of beef produced here is exported. We over produce, hugely, and its all subsidised.

Climate targets and an economic downturn will reduce the number of farms, but now is the time for rural ireland to diversify away from just farming, in order to secure its future.

I think you know the point he is making and choosing to ignore it.

I know two couples that moved out of Dublin to nearby county.

One lives in a nice estate with all amenities and services nearby.

The other chose to build a house in the middle of nowhere, an endless potholes winding "road" to visit them. Kids have to be driven to school and everywhere.

Both are without power. I feel sorry for both of them but a lot less so for the second couple.

The main over riding point to be taken from this storm is one we have been making on this forum for 20 years. Met Eireann just don't have enough weather stations dotted around the country.

Now that I live out in the sticks, after I get a Genny, I'll be getting a weather station to go with it.

Milk and other subsidies are gone. What subsidies are you thinking of?

Do you think everywhere outside the M50 is subsidised by south county Dublin?

If the storms bullseye had being Dublin with the entire city without power would you expect people from everywhere else to say "serves them right for living in high density!".

If you have zero empathy for the suffering of your fellow citizens around the country then better off saying nought. You just come across as insufferable.

West Galway. Approx 12 miles from Galway city. February 5th is approx time for electricity return. Grim but we are adapting. Not surprised because I have counted well over 10 poles down in our area. Drove to North Galway yesterday and there are massive trees down everywhere. People really need to top all those massive leylandi trees because a lot of them came down. Lots of houses have minor damage (slates gone or windows smashed by branches).

Still have water even though I heard we would lose it yesterday.

The one message I keep hearing is that this storm really really frightened people. Especially around 4-5am.

And cash is very important again! And board games and playing cards 🙂

In fairness there was probably more rural resilience 30 years ago. I remember going out to visit a friends house after one of the late 90s storms and they hadn't had electricity for weeks but it didn't bother them as they had the range heating the whole house which they were fueling with logs from previous storms, every room had torches and candles.

My grandmother didn't have indoor plumbing until the mid 1990s, but that was when there was still lots of relatives living locally that would drop in pails of spring water to her when she needed. Now with smaller families we have to plan to be more self contained and I reckon this storm will make people plan for more off grid resilience.

Power came back last night around 9. Thanks to the line and repair crews, brick bats to the organisation and the climageddon renewables besotted politicians who have directed efforts and funds away from more important matters like ensuring stability of supply.

I have an old Nokia 720, that has an FM radio in it. Twice, at 3pm and 5pm, I used it to listen to the news and hopefully get a sense of how the situation was being viewed as a nation.

RTE 1 was besotted with a feckin horse race, no news, and later with some other sporting event. I scanned a few other stations and there was just brief mentions of some minor drama involving the ESB and some few hundred thousand without power in some other country to the west, and now back to the hurling where there was some drama between offally and kilkenny when mid fielder Gavin couldentgivearuck, was...

O lord give me a feckin big con saw and a large tug boat so that I can detach those self-absorbed coulden't give a shizts from the 60% of us beyond the pale and tow them up next to Iceland.

Listening to the radio solved the mystery to me of all the, 'wasn't bad where I am, this storm of the century stuff is just hype and exageration' type posts on this thread.

I went from from wind-blown to mind-blown in just a few minutes.

Will have to play Crazy Golf there for a while.

There's no nonsense in my posts so if you are being aggravated by them, that's on you. ME could do with more stations but from the data we have, the evidence is that storms of the past were worse. For instance, on 9th feb 1988 ME had fewer stations than now, 14, with several of them well inland. 13 of the 14 recorded Red level guts with the other one Orange. Many stations were well into Red.

Problem is as people have recency bias and poor attention spans, 1961, 1974, 1987 (England) 1988, 1990, 1997, 1998 etc. may as well be 1839.

It is correct to say that Eowyn could have been worse, much worse. Then we can get into talking about the likelihood and the variables e.g sryanbruen's recent post about how warming of the North Atlantic possibly contributing to windstorms being weaker than they used to be.

I don't have to travel far to find people who could do with a generator. many in my locality still have no power today. Should I loan them my generator that I paid 1300 quid for? Well no, I'm not going to do that, especially since these people wouldn't piss on me if I was on fire. They also have 80k or more worth of vehicles on their driveways but no generator. Priorities.

Hopefully people will learn a big lesson from this storm although I doubt it. I've been storm aware since 1987 when I was 10 years old and as a child realised that if storms could hammer southern England, they could do the same to Ireland. One result of this is over the years I've spent thousands on tree maintenance to ensure that my trees are not going to be the ones taking down powerlines or blocking roads for me and other people. Can't say the same for some of the neighbours. I've watched some green Leylandii type trees grow from saplings well below powerlines to now huge but people don't give a sh1t. These are the people who are the bolloxes, not people posting meteorological facts on the internet.

You would not know that hundreds of thousands of the population are without power and many without water. The national broadcaster like the politicians has been completely absent in this crisis. That's the crux of it, there is nothing emanating from central channels to suggest that there is crisis conditions on the island.

A little bit of empathy and humility goes a long way.