Ireland in recent weeks has been, in Emily Bronte's words, a "trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere". But at least things are not as bad as they were at this time in 1839. The storm that struck Ireland on the night of the January 6th-7th that year was probably the most severe that this country has ever experienced. It is remembered as "The Night of the Big Wind", Oiche na Gaoithe Moire.
From the evidence available, the "Big Wind" was caused by a very deep depression that originated on the Atlantic and passed eastwards just to the north of Ireland and Scotland. In the early hours of Monday, January 7th, 1839, it lay over the northern Hebrides, and it was the very strong westerly winds that it generated over Ireland from this position which caused the havoc, all the more fearsome in that it was confined almost entirely to the hours of darkness.
Damage to shipping around the Irish coast was estimated at £500,000, an almost unimaginable sum of money in those days. Between 250 and 300 people lost their lives, 16 of them in Limerick alone, either crushed by falling masonry or swept away in the floods that accompanied the raging winds. Four hundred houses were reckoned to have been destroyed, and a total (amazingly, it would appear that someone must have counted) of 4,846 chimneys were demolished.
In Dublin the Liffey rose by many feet to overflow the quay walls. The trees along the Grand Canal were pulled up by the roots and hurled across the water to the opposite bank, while the splendid row of elms at the Royal Hospital Kilmainham was completely destroyed. Furniture flung out of upstairs windows of burning houses by the fierce gales was scattered far and wide. And to add to the horror, the aurora borealis burned brightly in the northern sky for the greater part of the night.
But even in those days it was an ill wind that blew nobody any good. With the enactment of the Old Age Pensions Act in 1909, those who could establish that they were 70 years old or more were entitled to a handsome pension of £13 a year. Since many Irish people of that generation had no written proof of age, other evidence was sometimes acceptable: anyone who could convincingly declare that "I could hold a potato in me hand on Oiche na Gaoithe Moire", suggesting that they must have been about the age of two, was assured of a comfortable old age.