Met Eireann confirms hottest April day EVER at Malin Head
It's official: new record of 23.4 degrees at Ireland's most northerly weather station
Inishowen has officially recorded its hottest April day of ALL-TIME – and it’s not even close.
Temperatures soared to 23.4 degrees Celsius at Malin Head on Wednesday, April 30, 2025, smashing the previous record for the month by a full two degrees.
Met Eireann has confirmed the new record high, easily beating all other April temperatures at Ireland’s most northerly weather station, stretching back to the early 1950s, when daily records were first kept there.
The previous record temperature for the month was 21.4 degrees on April 19, 2019.
In further evidence of global warming, the 20-degree barrier has only ever been reached eight times during April at Malin Head – and all of them, including 2025’s remarkable record, have come since the year 2003.
Finner Camp near Ballyshannon was even hotter than Inishowen, recording a temperature of 23.7 degrees on April 30, 2025, also a record for April.
The 23.4 degrees at Malin Head was hotter than every single day of 2024 – but you have to go back 70 years to find Inishowen’s hottest ever temperature, a sizzling 27.1 degrees, which came on August 24, 1955.
However, most of the record highs have been set in recent years, including September’s record of 26.2 degrees in 2023.
'Very unusual'
Speaking about this April’s record of 23.4 degrees, Met Eireann meteorologist Aoife Kealy said it’s even more unusual for a coastal station like Malin Head to see such high temperatures at this time of year.
“It is very unusual but not impossible to see temperatures past 20 degrees in April but they are more rare in coastal weather stations such as Malin Head,” she explained.
Incredibly, the freak heatwave lasted just for one day and temperatures had dropped down to 13.5 degrees by Thursday, May 1, a drop of TEN degrees in 24 hours, but more normal for the time of year.
Overall, the average temperature in Inishowen last month was 10.1 degrees, which was way above the long-term average of 8.4 degrees for our warmest April in many years.
In terms of April showers, Malin Head recorded 60.6 millimetres of rainfall, which was slightly below the 63.4mms monthly average.
As for whether or not the end-of-April heatwave is a sign of things to come, and a good summer ahead? Met Eireann said it's too early to say. Time will tell.