Perhaps the most striking of innumerable images of the power of Storm Éowyn yesterday morning came from a man who described on RTÉ how he felt the wind forcing open a domestic front door secured by a five-bar lock. Nature at its fiercest can upend our strongest defences and, thanks to human impacts on climate, it is getting fiercer all the time.
For 48 hours, and despite the sensational political turbulence in the Dáil, the news cycle has been dominated by predictions about Storm Éowyn, followed by consequences in keeping with, or exceeding, the grimmest forecasts.
National and private institutions, from schools to public transport, from broadband suppliers to retail stores, made radical short-term changes to their operations to respond. And this will become more common ; such storms are no longer isolated events, but are increasing in frequency and intensity year on year.
It is these increments in frequency and intensity, rather than any individual extreme event, that dovetail all too clearly with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s red warnings: unless we begin to halt and reverse global heating, we are rapidly making our planet uninhabitable.
We are becoming quite good at dealing with the immediate repercussions of extreme weather events, altering our behaviour to save lives and repairing networks afterwards. But investment is still needed in adapting and preparing to climate events. Ireland is exposed in some areas, notably power supply due to the dispersed nature of much of the population, as well as coastal flooding.
And we remain chronically unwilling to take decisive action to combat climate change. This can be seen nationally in the wipeout of the Green Party in the last election, and its replacement in the Government coalition by Independents who stridently oppose climate mitigation measures, making nonsense of the new Government’s promises to meet EU climate targets. We will clear up the mess caused by this storm in due course. But the wider lessons need to be learned, too.
