Past decade was Ireland's wettest on record

Freya Drohan

April 08, 2018 06:07 PM

A rainbow in Strickeen, KerryFlickr

When it rains, it pours. In no place is this more apparent than in Ireland - which has experienced more rain in the last ten years than ever before.

The Irish climate has in fact got wetter, according to a study of rainfall over the last 300 years.

It’s not just in your head that the Irish downpours are never ending either: the years between 2006 to 2015 were the wettest on record.

Dr Conor Murphy of Maynooth University led a study on rainfall, which found a “continuous rise in annual and winter rainfall” as a direct result of human-driven climate change.

Buttermilk Lane in Co Galway (Image via Flickr)

For the study, Dr. Murphy and his fellow researchers looked at rainfall from as far back as 1711.

The research showed that Ireland now has one of the longest continuous records of rainfall in the world.

The study, published in the journal Climate of the Past revealed that the most recent decade recorded 1,990mm of rain a year, compared with an average of 1,080mm over the 305 years.

Speaking to The Irish Times, Dr. Murphy said the wetter weather has had significant knock-on effects, such as more frequent flooding and stormier winters.

Pádraic Joyce, a Co Mayo-based dairy farmer with over 100 cows told the publication that the changing climate and increasing levels of rainfall are affecting Irish farming as sufficient supplies of fodder to feed livestock indoors are increasingly expensive and hard to come across.

“That all comes at a cost,” he told the paper.

“The end result is a lot of young farmers are getting out of the industry, because it’s not profitable at the moment.”.

A rainbow in Strickeen, KerryFlickr

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Past decade was Ireland's wettest on record

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