Ireland's Arctic Siege: The Big Freeze of 1947 Paperback – May 16, 2013

My wife wanted to read about this as her mother lived through this storm. After reading it a big conversation of memory lane ensued between them. Nice bit of history

Fantastic insight into Ireland's arctic winter of 1947. Fantastic detail of the struggle the people of Ireland had to endure during the arctic siege of 1947.

My family are from Wicklow and I was brought up hearing stories of food being air dropped into communities up in the mountains when the snow was bad. I was highly entertained by this book. The emphasis is on Dublin and the suffering of the tenement poor. The book relies heavily on newspaper accounts, which is fine, but just goes to compound the Dublin-centric emphasis. Nonetheless, it is vivid and compelling in its account of a nation left to survive as best it could in appalling conditions with little or no fuel and diminishing food stocks, whilst a complacent and inept government left it to its fate.It could have done with some judicious editing - as others have mentioned, the prologue is unnecessarily long and there is a lot of repetition. Students of Irish history should enjoy it though as an insight into a little-known interlude and as a testament to the resilience of a long-suffering nation.

Faint memories of it. Well worth a read. My father made a snow plough and pulled it behind a horse to help clear roads. This was in County Fermanagh. Two other books worth reading........Arctic Ireland, The extraordinary story of the great frost and forgotten famine of 1740 - 41. by David Dixon. There was 21 months of winter. Lough Neagh was frozen over, and people walked from County Tyrone to County Antrim. The Thames in London was also frozen over. Another book well worth reading is The night of the big wind, by Peter Carr. Thousands of trees were blown down and buildings destroyed.

I bought this book as a Christmas present for my Mam - she would have been a very young child during winter 1947 and didn't really remember how severe the weather was. She loved the book, thought that it was very well written and very interesting and gave a real insight into how life in Ireland was in the late 1940's.

A Time that happened in Ireland that I never knew anything about, never heard anyone talking about it which was quite unusual considering I had heard stories about other past events that happened in Ireland and this being just 15 years before I was born really amazed me, a truly wonderful and fascinating read, I highly recommend it

good book very interesting to read