Cathal Nolan

A very good morning, Clare.

Well, it certainly is.

Looking at the satellite picture at the moment, it's essentially wall-to-wall sunshine across the country, a little bit of high cloud in parts of the south-west and in over parts of West Cork and Kerry.

There will be a couple of heavy showers here during the late afternoon, evening, and a push-up across the Midlands later, but that's the exception rather than the rule for the majority of us today.

It is a case of blue skies, sunshine, and indeed, the settled weather is expected to continue over the weekend with

One or two little caveats.

There will be a little bit more cloud about first thing tomorrow.

That will clear away then as we go through the afternoon and evening with more in the way of sunshine following.

Similarly so on Sunday, good spells of hazy sunshine.

And even as we go into next week, it's expected that high pressure redevelops across the country and we see an extension of this very settled, very pleasant weather indeed.

We certainly did.

So eastern parts certainly experienced the worst of the rainfall during that particularly wet period.

I suppose really it lasted from the end of the autumn right the way through the winter, even into the start of the spring as well.

Unusual weather patterns led to that, of course, blocking areas of high pressure over Scandinavia and copious areas of low pressure then just stalling across the country, feeding in consistent supplies of heavy rain across the east of the country.

In terms of the temperatures so far, it has been the west of the country that's fared best.

The reason behind that is that we've had winds coming from an easterly direction at this time of the year.

Ocean and sea surface temperatures are still quite cold around Ireland.

They're only about 10 to 12 degrees Celsius at the moment.

So when we see the winds whisking in off the Irish Sea, it means that that colder air over the surface of the water pushes a couple of kilometres inland.

So unfortunately, eastern coastal fringes have seen temperatures probably below