Despite generous grants, the sector is languishing, due primarily to the legal obligation to replant forests in perpetuity

Insurance customers could be in for further premium hikes before the close of the year as FBD tries to claw itself back to profitability against a difficult backdrop.

Insurance customers are set to foot the bill for difficult market conditions last year which cost insurer FBD badly and saw it post a €4.5m pre-tax loss.

One in six people whose homes were weather-damaged over the last two years have not had them mended yet.

Pre-tax profit at insurance company FBD tumbled by almost 83% in the first half of the year as winter storms took their toll on the insurer’s business.

The Government has not given any signal to Cork Co Council on a funding request of €4.25 million to restore winter storm-damaged roads, piers and harbours.

Last February’s storms knocked winded insurance companies to the tune of €110m, according to latest calculations.

THE whine of the chainsaw can still be heard in the countryside as people continue to cut up trees laid low by Storm Darwin more than two months ago. You might say the ferocious storm had a sort of silver lining in that the fallen trees will result in more use of renewable fuel.

On a pleasant day, the view from the National Rowing Centre is picture postcard perfection.

Five hundred Eircom customers are still without phone services after a massive storm nearly two months ago.

Cork County Council is committing €1.2m of its reserves into repairing potholed roads, while it waits to see if the Government will reimburse it for the €2.27m worth of damage done to the roads since Storm Darwin on February 12.

Cork County Council has temporarily lifted an overtime ban on its road repair crews so they can try and tackle the pothole crisis on many of the county’s 12,000kms of roads.

The face of a shattered man put out of business by recent storms. Mike Foran, a potato and vegetable farmer whose business has been destroyed, is looking for an alternative livelihood, after being forced to close an enterprise developed over 15 years.

Plans for a major clean-up at a toxic dump in Cork harbour are to be the subject of a Bord Pleanála oral hearing.

Homes and businesses without landline phones could be waiting for several weeks more for restoration of service, Eircom said yesterday.

Horses valued at an estimated €1m were killed on a Co Limerick stud farm owned by Qatari interests, after being electrocuted during Storm Darwin.

Additional manpower has been drafted in from overseas to assist in the mammoth task of restoring power to the thousands of households and businesses still without electricity in the wake of Storm Darwin.

As another Atlantic storm bears down on the country today threatening to bring flooding in its wake, tens of thousands of homes could face days without clean drinking water thanks to the 170km/h storms that battered Ireland on Wednesday.