Yellow ice warning continues as temperatures dip

Further disruption is to be expected on Tuesday, as a yellow warning for ice remains in place.

Over 180 schools are closed mainly in the north east and north west, following a weekend of wintry weather which closed 200 schools on Monday.

Issuing a yellow warning for ice until 10:00 GMT on Tuesday, the Met Office warned of icy footpaths and patches on untreated roads and urged people to take care.

Due to poor weather conditions a number of Translink services have been impacted.

On Tuesday, bus services impacted by the weather conditions include:

• The metro service in Belfast to Blackrock and Lagmore view
• In Magherafelt and Cookstown buses may be unable to serve untreated roads
• The Ulsterbus 128 Carnlough to Ballymena service will not operate
• The 218 will not serve Drumadoon Park and Ride
• All school buses and services from Ballycastle, Ballymoney, Kilrea, Limavady and Coleraine will only operate on main roads that have been gritted
• In Armagh services will operate on main roads which have been gritted
• In Larne, the 158 service will not operate until further notice

More than 180 schools have announced they are closed on Tuesday as the icy weather continues.

A full list of the affected schools can be found here.

Brian Guthrie, the principal of Ebrington Primary School in Londonderry, had hoped to reopen today but conditions did not allow it.

“I spent a good bit of time on site yesterday, maybe three or four hours, clearing pathways and so on to make it safe but, unfortunately, as the day went on it seemed more and more schools were making a call to close,” he told BBC Radio Foyle’s North West Today programme.

He said the Foyle Learning Community – a network of 13 schools, which includes Foyle College – made a decision to close last night, so he was left with no choice but to do the same.

“I share a site with Foyle College and they would supply our meals for us as well as ground staff helping to clear the site and so on.

“It isn’t an easy decision and I know it has an impact on parents, it has an impact on the children, it has an impact on the learning and, look, apologies for that but it’s really about the community and making sure our school community is safe.”

St Brigid’s Primary School in Tirkane in County Londonderry is among the closed schools.

The principal Ursula O’Hanlon said 250 pupils are affected by the closure of the rural school.

O’Hanlon said the decision to close the school is a “huge decision” and it is taken with “great consideration”.

She said the snow and ice has not thawed, and that a decision will be made later on whether the school reopens on Wednesday.

“Nobody wants to be responsible for opening a school and hearing then that someone had an accident,” she told BBC Radio Ulster’s Good Morning Ulster programme.

O’Hanlon said she cannot expect parents to get children to school when buses are not servicing local roads.

Paddy Lavery, a principal engineer at the Department of Infrastructure, said there are over 300 members of staff working to keep the main roads open and safe.

Lavery said rural schools will always be a “difficulty” but there are special arrangements to treat some roads.

These special arrangements follow a scoring mechanism to decide where resources will be deployed.

This includes assessing whether there has been a history and a pattern of snow and ice around the school, if there is a bus with over 40 seats travelling to the school and the number of vehicles travelling to the school.

Lavery said there is an application process for rural roads to be treated, adding that over 50 schools are treated under special arrangements.

But he told the BBC if they are not pre-planned “it is difficult to fit that into the planned gritting route network”.

Hospital entrances are also treated under these arrangements.

In the Republic of Ireland, the Irish weather service Met Éireann has issued a status yellow warning for low temperatures and ice across all counties.

It began at 11:00 local time on Monday, and is due to expire at 09:00 on Tuesday.

A snow-ice warning is also in place in counties Donegal, Leitrim, Mayo and Sligo until 09:00.