Extreme Temperatures
Met Eireann said temperatures were around two degrees lower than average during the season, making it the coldest winter recorded since 1963.
Arctic conditions experienced at the end of last year continued through January and February, with widespread spells of frost, sleet and snow.
Temperatures plummeted to below minus 10C in some places, with minus 16.3C recorded at Mount Juliet, Co Kilkenny, on January 7.
While climate change campaigners say global warming is the planet's biggest danger, renowned physicist Vladimir Paar says most of central Europe will soon be covered in ice.
The freeze will be so complete that people will be able to walk from England to Ireland or across the North Sea from Scotland to northern Europe.
Professor Paar, from Croatia's Zagreb University, has spent decades analysing previous ice ages in Europe and what caused them.
"Most of Europe will be under ice, including Germany, Poland, France, Austria, Slovakia and a part of Slovenia," said the professor in an interview with the Index.hr.
"Previous ice ages lasted about 70,000 years. That's a fact and the new ice age can't be avoided.
The Earth's climate is changing in a dramatic way, with immense danger for mankind and the natural systems that sustain it. This was the frightening message broadcast to us by environmentalists in the recent past. Here are some of their prophecies.
The facts have emerged, in recent years and months, from research into past ice ages. They imply that the threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind.
(Nigel Calder, former editor of New Scientist, in International Wildlife, July 1975)
The cooling has already killed thousands of people in poor nations... If it continues, and no strong measures are taken to deal with it, the cooling will cause world famine, world chaos, and probably world war, and this could all come about by the year 2000. (Lowe Ponte, The Cooling, 1976)

More than 200 manatees have washed ashore since January, and carcasses are still turning up.
With temperature in central Florida dipping down again this week, conservationists are bracing for more animal and plant deaths due to unusually long winter cold snaps that have resulted in record wildlife losses.
Manatees have been among the hardest hit, with over 200 killed in January alone, and carcasses continuing to wash ashore. The highest number of manatee deaths for a single calendar year in Florida waters is 429, so local officials are closely monitoring these endangered marine mammals.
"Manatees can experience what is known as cold stress syndrome when they are exposed to water below 68 degrees Fahrenheit (20 degree Celsius) for long periods," Florida's Fish and Wildlife Research Institute spokesperson Carli Segelson told Discovery News. "This can result in death, or weaken manatees, leaving them more vulnerable to other health issues later."

A schematic representation of various geoengineering and carbon storage proposals: are such schemes selected on the basis that they assist in precipitating an Ice Age?
"Intervention in atmospheric and climatic matters . . . will unfold on a scale difficult to imagine at present. . . . this will merge each nation's affairs with those of every other, more thoroughly than the threat of a nuclear or any other war would have done." - John von Neumann1
Physician Vladimir Paar suggests one would not need to cross the sea when travelling from Ireland or UK to Croatia via the rest of Europe.
"A majority of Europe will be under ice, including Germany, Poland, France, Austria, Slovakia and part of Slovenia", Paar said in an interview on Croatian news website Index.
Scientists have only begun assessments, with dive teams looking for "bleaching" that is a telltale indicator of temperature stress in sensitive corals, but initial reports are bleak. The impact could extend from Key Largo through the Dry Tortugas west of Key West, a vast expanse that covers some of the prettiest and healthiest reefs in North America.
Given the depth and duration of frigid weather, Meaghan Johnson, marine science coordinator for The Nature Conservancy, expected to see losses. But she was stunned by what she saw when diving a patch reef 2.5 miles off Harry Harris Park in Key Largo.
Star and brain corals, large species that can take hundreds of years to grow, were as white and lifeless as bones, frozen to death. There were also dead sea turtles, eels and parrotfish littering the bottom.

Sarah Truebe, a geosciences doctoral student at the University of Arizona, checks on an experiment that measures how fast cave formations grow in Arizona's Cave of the Bells.
The finding is the first to document that the abrupt changes in Ice Age climate known from Greenland also occurred in the southwestern U.S., said co-author Julia E. Cole of the University of Arizona in Tucson.
"It's a new picture of the climate in the Southwest during the last Ice Age," said Cole, a UA professor of geosciences. "When it was cold in Greenland, it was wet here, and when it was warm in Greenland, it was dry here."
"If you went around and looked at some of these fish, you would cry," said Capt. Scott Moore of Anna Maria.
The coldest water temperatures in Tampa Bay since 1989 took a heavy toll on the tropical snook, which died when the water stayed in the low 50s and upper 40s for 10 straight days.
The thumb-sized bird had survived two major snow storms, subfreezing temperatures and high winds by feeding on sugar water from a Harwich woman's back yard feeder.
Lela Larned, Wild Care's executive director, said the bird was "at the end of the line."
She says it appears to be getting better, but whether it survives remains uncertain.
Comment: Given that global warming has not in fact been happening, and presuming the chief scientists involved in these military geo-engineering projects are aware of this fact to one degree or another, what does that tell us about the real objective behind the drive to "counter the effects of global warming" while blaming ordinary humanity?