Fears of widespread flooding are growing as another wet week is forecast by Met Éireann following Storm Dennis.
Many parts of the country experienced torrential rain over the weekend and winds gusting at 66 knots (122km/h).
Electricity had been restored to nearly all homes who lost power during Storm Dennis by Monday evening.
On Monday morning about 1,800 homes remained without electricity; however, ESB Networks crews restored power to the vast majority of those remaining outages over the course of the day.
A spokesman for the ESB said there was still a “very low” number of homes without power, however those levels were in line with ordinary outages during the winter period.
“All those who lost power over the storm are reconnected,” he said. Repair crews had reconnected the “vast majority” of those who lost power during the storm by Sunday evening, he said.
Met Éireann meteorologist Siobhán Ryan said the coming week would provide “very little respite” from the rough weather seen over the weekend.
Jet stream
“The jet stream is directly over us and it is driving a lot of low-pressure systems across the north Atlantic, so the strong signal is for lots of unsettled weather with plenty of wind and rain. There is a lot of rain on the way occasionally turning wintery,” she said.
“We are looking at similar amounts of rainfall as last week. There are no storm systems coming in, but there could be high volumes of rain on Wednesday and Thursday in the western half of the country. It looks like there could be high volumes of rain later in the weekend.”
Parts of the midlands received 40mm of rain over the weekend, some of it falling in very heavy showers.
Last week, most parts of the country had between 0.5 times and twice the average amount of rain, with Shannon Airport recording 93.6mm (almost four inches) of rain/snow in the seven days up to Saturday. This was five times the monthly average.
The forecast is for cold, blustery and showery weather up to Wednesday, after which it will get much wetter.
The rest of the week until next weekend looks to be very wet with a risk of further spot flooding on Friday.
Met Éireann is forecasting that between two and four times the average amount of rain will fall this week.
Most soil remains saturated or waterlogged after Storm Ciara and Storm Dennis and Met Éireann has warned that this will not improve over the week.
