Evelyn Cusack has said she would be happy if Ireland “never got a Storm Evelyn”.
As the 2026/27 storm season started on Tuesday, Cusack – the face of Irish weather forecasts for 40 years – was reluctant to appear too happy about the naming of a storm in her honour. Storm Evelyn is also named after Evelyn Murphy.
Both Irish women are pioneering figures in the world of meteorology. Murphy was the first woman to work as a meteorologist in Met Éireann and became, in 1983, the first female meteorologist to present the forecast on RTÉ television. She went on to head the marine unit and led the creation of the Irish Marine Data Buoy Observation Network.
Cusack was the first female head of forecasting at Met Éireann and one of the longest-serving forecasters on RTÉ. She was a familiar presence on television and radio during weather events for decades before retiring in 2023 after 42 years with Met Éireann.
Storm Evelyn is the fifth name listed for the new storm season, which lasts for a year.
Cusack described being included on the list as a “mixed blessing”. She said it would not be accurate to call it an “honour”, but acknowledged that it was a way of marking Met Éireann’s contribution to Irish life over 90 years.
“I’d be just as happy if we never got a Storm Evelyn. Who wants to be associated with violent winds and the destruction of property? I’m not joking,” she told RTÉ Radio 1’s News at One.
“It would be great if we got no storms at all because they can be very destructive.”
However, she added if there was no Storm Evelyn, it could be the result of a prolonged period of high pressure over the winter, which could lead to further drought conditions.
“We’d like some rain and a little bit of wind, but not storms,” she said of the autumn and winter.
Cusack said she no longer watches the weather forecast on television as it is “triggering”. Instead, she looks at the 10-day forecast on the Met Éireann app.
There are 21 names proposed in total for the storm season, but no more than the first seven or eight are usuallyused in an average year.
There were five named storms last year – Amy, Bram, Claudia, Chandra and Dave. The most was 14 in 2024/25 and the least was four in 2022/23.
Met Éireann and the UK Met Office started naming storms in 2015, with the Dutch weather service KNMI joining them in 2019. Each weather service gets to name seven of the 21 storms.
Storm Austen is named after Austen Nagle, the first director of the Irish Meteorological Service. Despite its Irish name, Storm Finn was nominated by the UK Met Office after a mother who said her two-year-old son Finn was “wild”.
El Niño could cause Ireland to have unseasonably warm autumn
Storm Kilian is named after Kilian Rohan, who was director of the Irish Meteorological Service from 1978 to 1981. Storm Miriam is named after Miriam Lyons, the first woman to work in Met Éireann as an operational meteorological officer. She was also the first Irish woman to fly in a jet fighter when posted to Casement Aerodrome.
Eoin Sherlock, head of Met Éireann’s forecasting division, said it has been proven that naming storms makes it easier for people to keep track of weather events and safety-related information.