FROM THE ARCHIVES:The country was in a bad state in spring 1947, in the final stages of one of the worst winters on record. With wartime shortages and rationing of essential commodities still in force, the heavy snow giving way to heavy rain and widespread flooding threatened a dire future, as this lead story explained.
– JOE JOYCE
AS RIVERS in heavy spate from recent thaws were bursting their banks, a ten-hour rainstorm – interrupted for half-an-hour by a blinding blizzard – swept three-quarters of the country yesterday, heralding the most devastating flooding for very many years.
Throughout the four provinces arable land is lying feet deep in swirling waters. The carcases of sheep and cattle are floating down swollen rivers. Thousands more cattle and sheep are starving. Fodder cannot be brought to them because roads and fields are impassable. The fuel situation in many places is described as “desperate.”
Agriculturists agree that the country faces the biggest food crisis in its history. From our correspondents all over the country come details of the damage wrought by the weather in the blackest year since the Famine. On the northern side of the Galtee mountains, in Co. Tipperary, sheep, sensing the danger of snows and flooding, are fleeing down the mountain slopes, leaving their lambs to perish. Farmers say that never in the hardest winters of previous years have they known such “widespread panic” among sheep.
On both sides of the Galtees thousands of sheep have been lost. One group of families living at Gleneushabina, have among them lost over eight hundred.
The conditions in this area are typical, and in our correspondents’ reports this sentence keeps recurring: “. . . little winter wheat has been sown, and it has been impossible to sow any spring wheat at all.”
In Wicklow town, streets are flooded. Church street is three feet deep in water. Children coming from a cinema had to be carried across the floods on the shoulders of their parents. The secretary of the Wicklow County Council sent an urgent message to Radio Éireann last night asking for a broadcast message warning motorists off Wicklow roads.
Rain, sleet and snow hit Bray. The Dargle overflowed, and boats washed up from the seashore floated through Strand road on four feet of water. Tables and other furniture could be seen floating in the rooms of houses.
A torrent of water a foot high rushed through the main street of Blackrock. A small river in the area also burst its banks. A sheet of water from Merrion gates to Rock road rose to over the running-boards of motor-cars. Ropes were used to rescue cars.
Railway lines between Dún Laoghaire and Glenageary were covered by nearly a foot of water.
The main Dublin-Belfast road at Santry was covered by 18 inches of water. Coolock village became almost isolated by floods. Fields and roads were almost a foot under water, and some houses were affected. At Islandbridge 20 feet of the Phœnix Park wall collapsed.
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