Séamas O'Reilly: Casting an eye back on the stormy Christmas of 1998

We felt its effects within the hour, since my family home is a large pebbledash bungalow that was — and still is — nestled in the gorse-strewn crook of that county’s border with Derry.

The storm itself I remember vividly, mainly from watching increasingly large things blowing past our kitchen window; first leaves and sticks, then branches and plastic bottles, and finally objects — fence posts, patio umbrellas, infants of Prague — that had no business speeding past in a massive, broiling soup of airborne debris. 

Wind speeds went above 100 mph over the next day and a half, and a weather station in Malin Head recorded a gust of 110mph, a figure which still stands just 3mph shy of its all-time record. 

Thousands of homes and businesses were significantly damaged and 162,000 people lost power at some point — with 8,000 of those going without electricity for five days or more. We, unfortunately, fell into the latter category.

Emerging from a powerless house at storm’s end, we surveyed the surreal aftermath firsthand. 

Every conceivable surface was covered in a light coating of twigs, mud, and moss, and the roof of our shed had been — rather comically, it must be said — blown clean off in one piece and deposited in our field. 

The ground beneath us was so caked in bits of scrub it looked like we’d paved the entire area with those spongy wee woodchips one finds in the children’s playgrounds of rural Ireland.

We realised why soon after, when we clocked that the treeline we’d looked out on for decades was now strangely altered. 

A 40-foot ash had come down, giving an eerily gap-toothed look to our familiar view. 

Worse still, in the manner of a drunkard lamping a bouncer and smashing a window as he’s being ejected from a nightclub, its mighty trunk had pulled down a powerline, smashed what remained of our roofless shed, and disjected tonnes of dusty little splinters as far as the eye could see.

For the next five days, we spent much of our daylight hours trying to clear the sodden vegetation. 

The older boys and men took turns brandishing axes at the meatier chunks of wood — a hard job, but one I couldn’t help envying as a weedy 13-year-old relegated to less masculine feats.

Alas, the smallest of us were tasked with handling the tree’s more Twiglet-sized deposits, which had gathered in their millions under every corner of the field, garage, and concrete driveway in front of us. 

(I did take one swing with the axe but, on raising it above my head, it swiftly flew from my hands. Though no one was hurt, it was decided that I was better suited to match stick duty, a service I quickly, and silently, resumed).

COLD COMFORT

Indoors, we obviously had no lights or TV or radio, and no way of using any of the presents we’d received that required mains electricity. 

In this regard, I felt primarily for my sisters Maeve and Orla, whose gift of a sumptuous multi-disc stereo had become, overnight, a very shiny and expensive CD holder.

More pressing, of course, was the cold.

Our radiators ran on oil, but the boiler itself was electric, which meant we had no heat whatsoever. 

(Paradoxically, our other problem was heat, since our fridge and freezers were worthless and rapidly spoiling the inhuman quantity of food and leftovers that, you might imagine, a family of 12 have amassed the day after Christmas). 

We had two gas Superser heaters — powered by those orange, Calorgas cannisters you get to blow up in computer games — and we stood around them like depression-era hobos, feeling heroically quite pathetic. 

Christmas cheer, so far as it could be achieved at all, was sought by digging out a small, portable television my dad had bought a decade before. 

Its screen was black and white and about six inches across, a godsend for keeping up with the news, but a rather damp squib when it came to six of us crowding around, by candlelight, to watch The World’s Strongest Man.

In that way of so many childhood dramas, it was boring and exciting at the same time. It’s only in latter years that I’ve considered it from my dad’s perspective. 

Twenty five years on, he doesn’t remember it that clearly, save for the fact that it spurred him to buy a generator. 

He’s an engineer, so his memory is primarily formed from memories of machines he’s bought. 

It has long been family lore that my oldest siblings’ lives are well-documented primarily because he was enamoured with camera technology in the mid-70s — a passion which had abated entirely by the time of my birth.

There exists, therefore, roughly eight photographs of me before I reached adulthood. 

Conversely, there is quite a lot of video footage of myself as a baby, because my father acquired a camcorder the week I was born, resulting in luxurious coverage of my christening, and the immediate shaving of his tentative moustache once he watched the footage and realised it wasn’t working for him as planned.

No photographs of Christmas 1998 survive, but it has been preserved in my film of memory ever since. 

Any time I feel deadened by the stresses of the festive season, tired of forced fun, small talk, and petty arguments about Fairytale Of New York, I remember a week of numbed cheeks and splintered fingers, rotting fridges and roofless sheds. 

There is joy, one finds, in perspective. 

For however bad any Christmas can be, it can always be, and has been, worse.