On Christmas morning 2009, I took a picture of the temperature reading on my car dashboard. I was in Carrick-on-Shannon, snow lay on the ground and it was minus 8 degrees Celcius. It was the coldest reading I had seen on my car’s temperature gauge thus far. On Christmas Day 2010, the car gauge read minus 12 in Eyre Square at 8.30 in the morning. It was the coldest I had seen in the city, but temperatures in the west of Ireland regularly dipped well below that temperature. The lowest temperature I witnessed myself was minus 15 near Athenry a few days before Xmas, but temperatures were lower than that in the north of the country.

The cold spell was long-lived by Irish standards, and in many towns and cities, frozen pipes meant no water for many people. Lakes and rivers froze too – even the Shannon. The picture above [taken on Dec 23rd] shows the river Suck (which flows into the Shannon) near the bridge at Ballyforan on the Roscommon/Galway border. The water near the bridge flowed freely but 50 metres downstream, the river surface was completely frozen.

Here is a view of the river when it is not frozen.

The fading light of sunset on the shortest day of 2010, captured in an icicle hanging from a gate near Maam Cross in west Galway.