Roger Fahy from New Quay, Co Clare, lost a stock bull in the storm and the roof was blown off one of his sheds.

The Clare dairy farmer started calving in recent days after storm Éowyn struck.

“I went out at 1am [on Friday morning] to check the cows and it was windy, but it was nothing like what came between 2am and 4am,” he told the Irish Farmers Journal.

“We could hear the slates banging off the house. It was like a nightmare. At 7am I went out to see the cows. The roller doors of the shed had buckled and the roof was gone off another shed. My first concern was where did the sheets land.

Destruction

“To see the doors buckled like that, thanks be to God there was no cow calving,” he said.

Roger then went to check another shed and yard at 10am and described “unbelievable” destruction. “I could see the wall of the slatted house was gone. It had an 8ft high wall with 6in blocks on flat. It wasn’t a weak wall.It took some belt and killed the two-year-old Hereford bull stone dead,” he said. He added that the pen he was in was 25ft by 16ft, a decent-sized pen.

“Even if the wall missed him, he was gone,” he said.

Roger commended a roofer who came to put 100 slates back on the roof of his house of Saturday, a man with a digger who helped clear up the blocks from the slatted shed and the ESB for getting power up and going on Tuesday evening.

“We have 10 cows calved and were milking them by hand. We’re back with the machine now,” he said.