Any number of circumstances can alter the course of history, but hostile weather is an all too frequent factor in Ireland's past, write Robert Pennand Antony Woodward
In an "excessive storm and dangerous bad weather", a ship bearing the "flower of Gaelic nobility" - the Earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnell, their families and associates - was lost off the south coast of England exactly 400 years ago today.
The Irish rebels, fleeing the Protestant authorities in fear of their lives, were bound for La Coruña in Spain and the bosom of the sympathetic court of Philip II. But the ship, battered by storms after it left Lough Swilly in Donegal, was now so disoriented that not even the captain knew "what particular coast was nearest to them". Any port in a storm will do now.
This was the Flight of the Earls - one of the most enigmatic and defining events in Irish history, marking, as many have noted since, the end of the medieval Gaelic order. Despite trailing in the sea a "cross of gold which contained a portion of the cross of the crucifixion", as Tadgh O'Cianáin, among the 99 aboard the ship, wrote, "they were obliged to take down their sails by reason of the strength and power of the waves, and to leave the ship to itself to drift over the sea as God should will."
The thankful party eventually reached Quilleboeuf on the French coast on October 4th, after 21 days at sea, with less than one barrel of drinking water to spare. The Earls never saw Ireland again, and the focus of resistance to the English government in Ireland was gone. The "Plantation" of Ulster, formerly the most Gaelic part of Ireland, could proceed with vigour.
Tantalisingly, the Earls and their "noble shipload" had come within 30 miles of Coruña, which begs the question: what might have happened had they made it to Spain, been received by Philip II and then dispatched back to Ireland at the head of a large Catholic invasion force? That was almost certainly the hope of Tyrone and Tyrconnell, before the massive storm intervened. Had the weather been better, would the next 400 years of Irish history have been very different?
The "what if" questions that hang over Irish history are legion. This is no shock. As the recent vogue for counterfactual history illustrates, alternative historical scenarios - imagining what might have been - can be applied to pivotal events anywhere in the world. What is more surprising is the number of instances in Irish political and social history that have swung on the weather - surprising because the distinguishing characteristic of the Irish climate is its equability.
"Ireland, in breadth, and for wholesomeness and serenity of climate, far surpasses Britain; for the snow scarcely ever lies there above three days: no man makes hay in the summer for winter's provision, or builds stables for his beasts of burden . . . the island abounds in milk and honey," the Venerable Bede wrote in his Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation in the 8th century. But the mollifying aspect of the Irish climate - the dearth of hard frosts, the soft, plentiful rain - masks the whole truth. By virtue of its geographical position, Ireland is something of a meteorological sentry for northwestern Europe, and exposed to the full rigour of Atlantic blows.
What is the thought to be the earliest documentary reference to a meteorological event anywhere in the British Isles was a storm on Lough Conn in Co Mayo, in 2668 BC, as recorded in the Annals of the Four Masters. Periodic, severe storms - occasioned usually by the residue of cyclones or the deepening of explosive depressions west of Ireland - have etched themselves onto the public consciousness ever since. In 1961, the remains of an extra-tropical cyclone - Hurricane Debbie - walloped into the north during the annual Northern Ireland Forestry Division tree-felling competition. Sparing no thought for the lumberjacks, hundreds of acres of forests were thrown down in winds gusting at 160kph (100mph) and scarcely a house in Derry city was undamaged.
In 1986, Hurricane Charley flooded Dublin, and in 2006 the remnants of Hurricane Gordon disrupted the Ryder Cup. But no 20th-century storm compares with the carnage of January 1839. "Oiche na Gaoithe Moire" - "the Night of the Big Wind" - left tens of thousands homeless in the midlands and remained a milestone for generations: when the national state pension system was introduced in 1909, people trying to prove their age without documents were simply asked if they remembered the storm.
The gale that raises the greatest "what if" in Irish history, however, is the one that wracked and eventually broke up the French invasion fleet in Bantry Bay in 1796. At least the rebels were on their way to Ireland on this occasion. The day the French fleet - 43 ships carrying 14,000 troops and great quantities of arms, ammunitions and stores, commanded by the brilliant young general, Lazare Hoche - left Brittany for Ireland, the first storm struck.
Hoche's flagship was separated, and not seen again. Theobold Wolfe Tone, to many the father of Irish republicanism and the co-ordinator of this invasion and the uprising of United Irishmen that was supposed to follow, was aboard one of the ships. Following the first storm, the weather closed in "a fog so thick that we cannot see a ship's length before us", he noted.
Four days later, the already depleted French force reached Cape Clear, and sailed into Bantry Bay, the beautiful sea loch, 42km (26-miles) long, 11km (seven-miles) broad and with a draught of 40 fathoms, on the coast of Co Cork. The ships anchored as the weather intensified. "A heavy gale from the eastward with snow," Wolfe Tone noted on December 23rd, as half of the fleet was swept out into the Atlantic, leaving just 16 ships and a fraction of the troops. The enterprise - to overthrow British rule in Ireland - was now doomed.
"Everything depends upon the promptitude and audacity of our first movement," Tone gloomily wrote, but the "infernal wind continues without intermission". In fact, the storm strengthened with every passing day. In complete disarray, the last ships were ordered to cut their anchor cables and make for the open sea before the gale on December 27th. They retreated to France, "in a perfect hurricane". The English hadn't had such an escape since the Spanish Armada.
As Robert Kee writes in The Most Distressful Country: "If the French had indeed arrived in Bantry Bay with the 14,000 troops with which they had set out, the future history of Ireland might have been very different." Certainly, the English military in Ireland was weak and ill-prepared. Wolfe Tone and Hoche had every prospect of success. Had the weather abated and the invasion force landed, Ireland might have been independent 125 years before its time.
The legacy of all these stinging Atlantic storms is reflected in the rich vocabulary in Irish for describing "wind" or "gaoth". It's the most feared of the meteorological elements, and there are words for every type of whistle and blow, from "soinneán" (blast of wind) to "ruatieach" (dry, cold wind) via "fuamán" (the wind beside a river) and "seadbháisteach" (rain in the wind). Curiously though, it was not a roaring gale from the west that provided the meteorological backdrop for the defining historical event in modern Irish history - an Ghorta Mór, the Great Hunger - but a light breeze from the east.
Throughout the summer of 1845, the weather in Ireland was unusually mild, grey and wet - perfect climatic conditions for the fungus phytophthora infestans, which arrived from England on a breeze in August. To germinate, the fungus spores need moisture. When mature, spores are detached by splashing rain or soft breezes and carried to surrounding plants. In this way, a single plant can infect thousands in hours - but conditions must be exactly right. Cool, wet nights and cloudy days with high humidity, a slight breeze and a temperature of more than 10 degrees are ideal. The weather remained the same into the autumn of 1845, and by October, millions of ripe tubers had turned black and a nauseous stench pervaded the country. The famine, as every school child knows, began in spring of 1846 and continued - the summer of 1846 once again providing ideal conditions for the spread of the blight - long enough to be compounded by the unusually severe winter of 1846-7 when many, weakened by starvation and disease, died from exposure.
Today we are largely shielded - through better housing infrastructure and improved weather forecasts - from the impact of the weather. Great storms will wrack Ireland in the future, though. Will they prove pivotal in history again? The answer to that is, well, blowing in the "gaoth".
The Wrong Kind of Snow - The Complete Daily Companion to the British Weather by Antony Woodward and Robert Penn is published by Hodder & Stoughton on Oct 18
