The Night of the Big Wind – 1839

186 years ago, Ireland had a worst natural disaster for hundreds of years before that. It is part of our folklore as “The Night of the Big Wind” (Oíche na Gaoithe Móire)

This was a powerful windstorm that swept across Ireland, beginning on the afternoon of January 6, 1839, causing severe damage to property and several hundred deaths. Twenty to twenty-five percent of houses in north Dublin were damaged or destroyed, and forty-two ships were wrecked. (Wikipedia)

Some snippets of information on this well documented event:

“Loss in wildlife and livestock was huge, such a common species of bird like the crow became ‘nearly extinct’ for years after. In Monaghan, ‘the ground was reportedly ‘black’ with the mangled bodies of crows, showing how devastating this storm was. One Clare sheep farmer ‘losing 170 sheep’ and records showing ‘roosting hens being blown a distance of half a mile’ in County Leitrim, just showing the force of the Big Wind.

The morning after on Monday morning, people woke up to looking up to the sky and daylight getting through their roofs. Everyone had their own horrors, suffering and escapes they had to tell of. It was nearly certain that three million trees fell, and it would take ‘a generation to restore the countryside it had enjoyed the summer before’. This further shows the mass extent of how devastating this storm was. A whole generation would have to be taken to restore the countryside from just one night of destruction”.  (from a report by Matthew Patterson, Markethill High School, 2010 based on “The Night of the Big Wind”, by Peter Carr)

Roofs were swept from thatched houses and houses built on elevated sites were badly damaged. As a result, most houses built in the countryside in the years afterwards were built in very sheltered places in fear of another very bad storm.

One amusing bit of information comes from the Old Age Pension –In the implementation of the Old Age Pensions Act, on I January 1909, all old people of seventy years and over could now claim a yearly pension of £13. But many Irish people in that age group had no written evidence that they were over seventy, and local committees were set up to investigate their claims. The committees found that a convenient way of ascertaining the true age of claimants was to find out if they could remember the 1839 storm, or if they had at least been born at the time.

The Co. Galway traditional storyteller. Tomas Laighleis, recalled his delight at being taken out of the schoolroom by the parish priest, who asked him to round up all the old people of the parish to be interviewed. The births of many of these old people had never been recorded in the baptismal register of the parish, and the priest wanted to ask them about their memories of the Night of the Big Wind.– Irish Times

The committees found that a convenient way of ascertaining the true age of claimants so one of the questions used to establish proof of age was whether the applicant remembered the Night of the Big Wind. Its not surprising that many, who hadn’t reached to age of 70, could now miraculously remember the night of the big Wind in order get the pension.

In later years, it was surprising the many people of western counties who died at the astonishing age of 112 or more!

One such applicant was Tim Joyce of Co Limerick. “I always thought I was 60,” he explained. “But my friends came to me and told me they were certain sure I was 70 and as there were three or four of them against me, the evidence was too strong for me. I put in for the pension and got it.”

Agricultural damage
The loss of farming stocks of all kinds has been terrible. Many of the most thrifty and industrious husbandmen, whose haggards and homesteads were filled with unthreshed corn on Sunday night, found themselves without a sheaf of grain in the morning. {Dublin Evening Post 12 January 1839)

There were reports of large ricks of corn and hay being blown away a mile from the haggards (Galway Weekly Advertiser 13 January 1839) and the rivers and lakes were full of corn and straw. There must have been considerable damage to livestock as well, but there are only occasional mentions of this.

Houses on fire

In some cases more was lost as a result of fires spread in the wind than from the direct force of the gale. Most rural dwellings were roofed in lightly secured thatch, easily ignited when the wind fanned the embers of the turf fires in the hearth below. In
Granard, Co. Longford, the country people asserted that they saw the fire falling down from the clouds. (Tuam Herald 19 January 1839). In Loughrea 103 houses were destroyed, of which seventy-one were burned (Galway Weekly Advertiser 19 January 1839).
Fifteen houses were burned in Gort, thirteen in Ballinasloe, and more than 100 in Athlone (Tuam Herald 12 January 1839). In Castlebar, very few houses escaped damage, and the dwellings of the poor were worst affected (Mayo Constitution, quoted in Tuam Herald 12 January 1839).

Poor people suffered the most
The poor of course, as being the most numerous, have been the greatest sufferers. Tens of thousands of their wretched cabins have been swept away or unroofed — and many, as we have seen, have become a prey to the flames. {Dublin Evening Post 12 January 1839)

Another story:“On that night he was afraid the house might be blown down, he tied a rope round his mother to bring her to a neighbour’s house a few fields away. On the way a thought struck him, whether he shut his own door and that he had better go back and see. But what to do with his mother he could not think. “So he tied her to a small tree, while he was going back. When he returned, he could not find her or the tree. On searching, he found her in a dyke at the other side of the field”.

Met Éireann gives one of the best accounts of the storm

Also  “Historical Ballinrobe” The Night of the Big Wind

Wikipedia – The Night of the Big Wind

Eugene Duggan, Athenry” Oíche na Gaoithe Móire

Oíche na Gaoithe Móire was the worst natural disaster to hit Ireland and Great Britain for hundreds of years – until this year. According to Wikipedia Storm Éowyn was an extremely powerful and record-breaking extratropical cyclone which hit Ireland, the Isle of Man and the United Kingdom on 24 January 2025 …  Éowyn was named by the UK Met Office on 21 January 2025.