Galway’s two local authorities required a multi-million bailout to cover the cost of Storm Éowyn which ravaged the west coast last January.
The Department of Local Government forked out more than €3.5 million in “severe weather exceptional payments” to defray council clean-ups across Galway in 2025, after Storm Éowyn’s catastrophic damage to roads, trees and local authority-owned assets this time last year.
The Galway County Council received €2,103,454, while Galway City Council received €1,410,819.
Their combined total makes up a whopping 19 per cent of the department’s €18.6 million it disbursed to 29 local authorities in 2025 to assist with exceptional weather events – a reflection of the damage Éowyn did to the west of Ireland, as the department’s national figure also covers storms Amy and Bert, both last autumn, which did not impact the western seaboard.
Mayo County Council received the most emergency funding last year – almost €2.6 million. The average payment to a local authority last year was almost €650,000.
Galway City Council itself calculates it has spent €1.96 million to date on Storm Éowyn clean-up and asset damage, leaving it €550,000 in the red after receiving emergency funding from the Department’s National Directorate for Fire and Emergency Management.
Since 2009, the Department of Local Government has paid out more than €100 million to assist local authorities meet the unbudgeted costs of storm clean-ups, including exceptional overtime payments, the hire of plant and heavy machinery, the purchase of materials required for the clean-up, and hiring specialist contractors.
The umbrella organisation for Ireland’s insurance industry calculated Storm Éowyn is the most expensive insurance event in Irish history. Insurance Ireland said its members had paid out more than €301 million by August last year, based on 33,768 claims.
Businesses made almost €166 million worth of claims, while householders claimed more than €129 million. The balance of €6m was claims against motor insurance. Although claims are not broken down by county, it is presumed the majority stem from the West.
58,000 Galway homes without power
With gusts of 184kmph recorded at Mace Head near Carna, the storm broke 80-year-old Irish weather records, and knocked out electricity for more than 815,000 properties across the island this time last year.
ESB Networks estimates 58,000 customers were impacted in its “Galway planning area,” making Galway one of the worst impacted counties. It required a large proportion of the €100 million the utility was forced to spend on network reconnections and repairs in 2025 related to this storm. More than 4,000 staff and contractors from 12 countries worked on getting affected homes plugged in.
Some households in rural Galway had no electricity for several weeks, and repairs to public lighting around Galway city are still ongoing a year later.
Large parts of parkland and forestry around Galway, including Merlin Woods in Galway city, are still closed to the public since Éowyn more than decimated trees across the country.
Last week, Coillte confirmed it lost 50 million trees, and that clean-up costs of more than 26,000 hectares will continue into 2027, costing around €60 million. Department of Agriculture analysis of European Space Agency images indicate at least 8,000 acres of public forestry were lost across Galway. The damage to Galway’s vast, 25,000 hectares of private forestry is unknown, but the eastern part of the county was particularly badly hit.
Researchers at the University of Galway calculated that Storm Éowyn generated the highest storm surges ever recorded on the west coast, with Galway Port experiencing surges of 2.6m above the day’s predicted astronomical tide on January 24.
The team of mathematicians, scientists and engineers calculated that if a similar storm arrived only days earlier, during the high water spring tide, the water level in central Galway would have breached 4.96m (over 16ft ) with disastrous consequences for the city and coastal suburbs.
“The data we recovered from the hours around Storm Éowyn shows just how narrowly tens of thousands of people avoided tidal inundation and threats to cities, towns and coastal communities. It is hard to imagine how narrowly we avoided unprecedented storm surge flooding and an inundation, in particular in towns and cities,” said engineer, Dr Indiana Olbert, last April, after crunching data from the winter storm.
