Irish Examiner view: A golden sky at the end of Storm Darragh
Britain Picture: Birds A Trying Blustery Lawless/pa And Dublin Darragh To Pedestrian Into The And Conditions Storm As Ireland Navigate Clontarf, In Brian Slammed
It will come as no great consolation that the 2024-2025 storm season — which commenced at the end of August — has only reached the fourth entry on its list of names.
Although we have experienced plenty of Storm Darragh since it roiled across these shores, it is a gloomy thought that the experts at Met Éireann; Britain’s Met Office; and KNMI, the Dutch weather service, have another 17 nomenclatures waiting in the wings.
Anticipating their moment of notoriety are Éowyn, Floris, Gerben, Hugo, Izzy, James, Kayleigh, Lewis, Mavis, Naoise, Otje, Poppy, Rafi, Sayuri, Tilly, Vivienne, and Wren.
This weekend’s winds, recorded at 141km/h at Mace Head in Galway, are the strongest to hit the country since Storm Ellen four years ago. Thousands of homes remain without electricity with ESB Networks warning it could take several days, or up to a week in some cases, to restore power to all.
The severity and scale of the damage makes this the worst outage since Storm Ophelia ravaged Ireland in 2017.
Uisce Éireann reported disruption to water treatment plants in Kerry, Limerick, Clare, Tipperary, Waterford, Donegal, Leitrim, and Galway, and also deployed generators at key sites where power outages were likely.
Telecommunications firm Eir said there were more than 35,000 broadband faults, 20,000 fixed voice, and about 500 mobile network site failures.
While the disruption has been severe, there was also heavy disappointment for everyone who planned to travel to Goodison Park on Merseyside for the final league derby between Everton and Liverpool at the historic ground.
Thwarted fans included 15-year-old Mackenzie Kinsella, from Sydney in Australia, who had saved €1,750 to go on a two-week trip to see Sean Dyche’s side play against Wolves and Arne Slot’s side.
While his hopes of seeing his beloved Toffees beat the Reds were dashed by Darragh, Everton’s Irish captain Séamus Coleman sent him a heartwarming video message and invited him to meet the squad. A reminder that there can be a golden sky at the end of the storm.
It was at the start of September nine years ago that the editor of the took the decision to publish a truly harrowing picture on page one of this newspaper.
It was a graphic image of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi, washed up on a beach in Bodrum, Turkey, after he had drowned with his mother and brother.
The small boy was one of millions of refugees escaping a civil war in Northern Syria between the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant and the government forces, backed by Moscow and Tehran, of president Bashar al-Assad.
Yesterday, as the jihadist forces of Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS) swept into the historic capital of Damascus, it was the turn of Mr Assad to flee his country, which has been wracked by civil war since 2011. He had previously retained control because of relentless Russian airstrikes, including the use of chemical weapons, and Iranian-backed Hezbollah troops.
More than 7m people left the country during Mr Assad’s murderous regime. Hundreds of thousands were killed.
The bewildering and accelerating speed of change in Syria echoes what has happened through history when corrupt regimes start to collapse: The capture of Saigon; the break-up of the Warsaw Pact; the falls of Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi.
What follows such transitions is not always benign and the West must be cautious. Hayat Tahrir al Sham is an unknown quantity and, until 2017, was an affiliate of al Qaeda. It remains designated as a terror group by the US.
Israel moved yesterday to destroy Syrian arms dumps and to establish buffer zones in the demilitarised Golan Heights, pointing to further volatility in one of the world’s most dangerous theatres of war.
The departure of Mr Assad is good news, but not necessarily the end.
Bob Geldof famously described Irish showband music as a bunch of guys wearing shiny suits and playing covers.
But, as we have seen from the expressions of sympathy and grief following the death of a leading exponent — the singer Dickie Rock — that did not reduce its popularity.
Rock, 88, born in Dublin and brought up in Cabra, achieved 28 Irish chart singles between 1963 and 1989. He had 13 top 10 singles and seven No 1s with the Miami Showband, leaving the group two years before the Ulster Volunteer Force massacre of 1975.
Although a number of his songs were remakes of classic overseas hits by singers such as Elvis Presley, John Denver, Tony Bennett, and Kenny Rogers, Rock also achieved homegrown success with numbers such as ‘Baby, I’m Your Man’ and ‘Come Back to Stay’ — Ireland’s entry in the 1966 Eurovision Song Contest.
It is sometimes held that the success of showbands and their lead singers marked the beginning of celebrity stardom in the Republic, producing a lineage which can be traced down to U2 and beyond with impacts upon entertainment and society in general.
Rock developed a flamboyant stage presence which would not have been out of place with glam rock or even punk successors: High kicking, shirt opened to the waist, sometimes discarded completely for publicity shots. Well-coiffured hair and tan.
Some fans, he told a newspaper interviewer, would even urge him: “Spit on me, Dickie.”
Rock retired from showbiz in 2021 because he had developed problems with his hearing. His wife Judy died in April two years ago — some weeks after contracting covid.