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Updated 11am
A ‘STATUS RED’ weather alert will remains in place until later this afternoon as winds of up to 150km per hour batter parts of the country.
Motorists are being urged to take care on the roads, and some travel operators have cancelled services.
Schools in counties affected by the ‘red’ warning have been advised not to open.
Flooding and trees down have been reported in a number of areas.
The north and west are worst affected by the stormy weather at the moment.
According to Met Éireann, coastal areas in particular are experiencing “some severe damaging gusts of 130 to 150 km/h”.
Elsewhere:
“There will also be heavy showers this morning, of hail and thunder, which will fall as sleet and snow on higher ground and these may lead to spot flooding.
“Parts of the east and southeast will start today drier and less windy, with some frost, but a band of heavy showers will spread southeastwards from the north later this morning and through the afternoon, with strong and gusty winds to follow to all parts.
This morning, winds picked up to red levels in the west and north.
However:
“The strong winds will start to ease off towards the evening.”
The rain did ease off this morning but has come back hard
The code red alert applies to:
Kerry’s alert was downgraded to orange this morning.
The rest of the country is under a status orange warning and there is a yellow rain warning in place for:
Limerick City and County Council said that no significant incidents were reported overnight as a result of Storm Rachel. All the county’s national roads have been gritted and no emergency calls were received, they noted.
“The roads are a dangerous place,” Met Éireann’s Gerard Fleming said on Morning Ireland today.
“If you can stay indoors… then that would be wise.”
The well-known meteorologist expects the storm to “ease off” in the latter part of this afternoon in some parts, while it will be early evening or tonight in others.
Gardaí are urging care on all routes. Remember — there may be fallen debris in areas where the worst of the winds have passed.
There is flooding reported:
There is more spot flooding on the N58 between Ballyvarry and Foxford in Mayo.
Meanwhile, a number of roads are impacted by fallen debris and trees with Kildare particularly affected.
There are delays of about an hour to all Irish Rail services….
But Bus Éireann is running as normal, but with some delays in the northwest.
Irish Ferries have cancelled the majority of their planned journeys today and passengers for tonight’s sailings are advised to continue to check in with the website.
Dublin Airport says it’s “business as usual” this morning but “passengers advised to check flight status with airline before coming to the airport”.
It’s also grand down in Shannon.
There are currently 17,000 ESB Networks customers without power. See more here.
First published 6.40am; additional reporting by Sinéad O’Carroll
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That’s the problem with todays media reporting of live events, they are all so busy trying to get one up on the other channels that they don’t think for a minute about what they are saying. Imagine hiding out from some langer trying to kill you only for some idiot reporter to come on air and say “oh by the way there’s 4 hostages hiding out in the cold room”!
If you can get your hands on “the human face of big data”, there’s an interesting piece on how terrorists use data and how in more prolific hostage taking countries it’s now quite common for live selected killings to take place using human search engines and media outlets for info. Or even waiting to carry out an attack to see who is in their area. Next gen terrorism. Off point but interesting.
Its not just a modern thing – during a ground stand-off following an aircraft hijacking (in the 1970′s I think) special forces had approached the plane via a blind spot to launch a surprise raid on the hijackers. Unfortunately events were being broadcast on live radio and the hijackers were listening in and knew exactly what was about to happen, with disastrous results.
Amen.
What Globalist Murdoch said about the Sydney Siege comes to mind.
Bloodthirsty vampire.
http://www.thejournal.ie/murdoch-tweet-sydney-1836603-Dec2014/
Good move. Hopefully the media will cop on a bit more. If some aren’t making it up they are getting it all wrong.
Fox News springs to mind!
About time the tv media were taken to task, imagine if that lunatic had been watching the live stream and did go down to the chiller they were hiding in…unthinkable acts would have ensued.
In this day and age you would think tv news channels would have more cop on…but I suppose being more and more sensationalist is worth more than a life in this day and age. How many more lives would have been saved that day if that sick man was not put under the spotlight?
Its sad really that there is an appetite for this sensationalism.
Apparently the gunman was watching but must have missed that report. The cop is to blame here as well as he shouldn’t have told the media anything in the first place. With today’s communications it would be easy for any gunman to have someone else watching TV, twitter etc and keeping them informed of what was going on. Best keep the media away from they area and in the dark until it’s all over.
I wonder if that journalist would have been so eager to broadcast that information if one of his own relatives was hiding in that freezer?…..I think not…….which just goes to show how little empathy some journalists have with other people in deadly situations.
I wonder what nationality and religion the editor / producer : journalist are?
It’s like that film Night Crawler. Ratings are worth more to these stations than human lives. Check it out. Jake Gyllenhaal is great in it.
I was thinking more about the reporter from Die Hard and Die Hard 2.
Yes. Just what I was thinking. Great movie.
Some of these”repoters” are sociopaths.
Look at the way they vilify Israel for its conduct in the war against Hamas terror,though experts in this field attest that Israel took the most extraordinary efforts to keep civilian casualties at a minimum while Hamas used its own people as shields in some cases. But vilifying Israel feeds the Jew-hatred and sells so ‘to hell with the facts go for what sells’.
See excerpt from Colonel Kemp’s report
–Three days ago I spoke to an Israeli pilot that told me that the same morning he had aborted an enemy target a total of 17 times because there were civilians in the target zone, and eventually he abandoned the operation. I asked him, was that not frustrating? His answer was simply no. And that to me, is one of the best things about the IAF – that the last very thing they want to do is bomb a target and have that on their conscience for the rest of their lives. And it was the same thing with infantry soldiers. I spoke to soldiers who have been fighting in Gaza, and several of them said to me: ‘We know what the rules of engagement are but even without them, it is always on our minds that we cannot kill civilians.’ See for them, this has nothing to do with orders, it’s just always there at the forefront. We’re talking about [reservists who are] simply artists, metal-workers, musicians, they are not killers. They have absolutely no desire to kill civilians. In fact, in terms of civilian casualties, the attitude of IDF solders is the exact mirror image of the way they’re portrayed to the world.
http://www.algemeiner.com/2014/07/30/col-richard-kemp-israeli-pilot-aborted-gaza-strike-17-times-to-protect-civilians-jewish-people-should-be-proud-of-the-state-of-israel-interview/
Happy Easter All!
Truly and accurately stated. You’ll get red thumbs galore, no doubt, Patrick, but that just goes to show that many people don’t like the truth messing up their paradigm.
@Elias Khoury! Thanks for Elias’ sentiment. Your prediction was so but not so bad and some of them even red-thumbed Elias to spite me.Laughable isn’t it!
I worry not but to speak the truth as I see it. People have a very healthy scepticism about the newsmedia here and it’s just a matter of time before they cotton-on to the con-job the Hamas/PLO and other Jihadders have pulled on them via the self-seeking media.
Additionally, Jew-hatred is on the wane however imperceptible it seems.
Happy Easter…
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