Cork teens build igloo as cold-snap sweeps country

People are keeping warm by getting creative with the snow!

The three boys in north Cork built the snowy structure in their front garden after careful planning over the weekend.

Leaving Certificate students Colin O'Leary, Seán O’Sullivan and Aidan Buckley spent over five hours on Sunday carefully sculpting their igloo in the O’Leary’s front garden in Commons near Newmarket.

The houses in Commons are currently cut-off as the rural backroads leading to the area remain impassable.

Unable to leave their townland and without electricity and internet since Sunday morning, the boys decided to occupy themselves by building the igloo.

The snowy structure is spacious inside, measuring approximately six metres in length and over two metres wide.

The three boys have slept in the igloo in sleeping bags and have created makeshift furniture using crates. They have even installed lighting in the igloo.

Elsewhere, residents in a County Limerick village may have built the biggest snowman in Ireland, measuring an impressive 23 feet.

Servatius Antonius and a number of his friends named their huge snowman, which took them five hours to construct, Big Bill. The snow figure on the soccer pitch in Elton - close to the Limerick/Tipperary border.

They too had no water or electricity. Antonius said: "We built the snowman from making the base from rolling big balls of snow together. As it got higher the balls of snow got smaller and smaller as we had to use a ladder. 

"Eventually, when we got around 14 foot above the ground, the three guys threw up big snowballs to me as I slowly stacked it. The aim was to make a snowman where a traffic cone was used as the nose!"

The cold-snap is set to last through to the weekend with Status Yellow warnings in place for the whole country and Status Orange low temperature and ice warning for 25 counties.