Lucinda Creighton feels "strangely exhilarated" about the outcome of her very political summer.
"This has been a tale of two summers for me. The first part was frenetic. I spent every week of May and June traveling to different countries as we reached the final stages of Ireland's EU presidency. I was in Washington DC for meetings on the EU-US trade deal, represented the Government in the European Parliament, met the new European Affairs Minister of France in advance of the EU summit, accompanied President Higgins on his State visit to Croatia, and much more. It was exhausting but very interesting work. Then it all came grinding to a halt (in more ways than one).
We concluded the presidency with a low-key “thank you” reception for our hard-working civil servants in Dublin Castle. Very quickly I found myself in the midst of the intense and difficult abortion debate. I voted against the legislation and found myself kicked out of my party and essentially dismissed from my job as Minister of State for European Affairs.
The latter part of the summer has been less of a whirlwind, but it has been busy. I moved out of Government Buildings and returned to Leinster House, where I had to respond to thousands of emails, messages and letters I received in the aftermath of my expulsion from Fine Gael. I had time to reflect upon the future. I feel strangely exhilarated and excited about the opportunity that my colleagues and I now have to really try to effect some change on the Irish political landscape. The next six months might well be far more interesting than the last six months. Time will tell.”
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Ice-cream had a bumper summer, as Caroline Smith of Smith's Ice Cream Vans explains.
"Those couple of weeks we had in July had a good impact. Ger [Caroline's husband] is in this game over 30 years and I'm with him for 15, so it's a long time since we got a good summer. That said, it has a knock-on negative impact when the weather drops again.
“You have to make hay when the sun shines, so it’s seven days a week, non-stop. We have 15 vans, so we would have pitches on certain beaches. The pitches vary year to year but we were lucky this year with Malahide beach, Donabate beach and Bettystown beach. We do events as well, whether it’s a vintage show, an agricultural show, that kind of thing.
“I was run ragged at one stage. My phone never stopped ringing. When the sun shone, everyone in the country wanted ice-cream vans. Corporate business took off. The phone never stopped with companies ringing to treat their staff last minute. They’d ring up looking for a van the same day, so the logistics are difficult from my perspective, because obviously you don’t want to turn it down.
“We run from February through to the end of October, then it’s holiday time for me. Mine’s a 99 with no sauce. I hate the sauce.”
Farmers emerged from a rough winter and early summer into a glorious harvest season. Eddie Downey is a farmer and deputy president of the Irish Farmers' Association.
"I had actually sold some silage earlier in the spring to try and get the neighbours out of trouble, so we ended up very tight at the end of that. I'm in Co Meath, and there are a lot of farmers here who had similar problems. Almost every farmer in the county ran out of feed; that never happened before.
“We went over to England and bought 8,000 tons-worth of maize silage. We also brought a lot of hay in from England. Myself and a colleague of mine went to France to buy hay. When we got there, a farmer told us there were 2,000 bales in the area.
"We said we'd take them all if he organised it, and he said 'No, the farmers have to meet these men buying the hay'. There was a sense of pride among the French, sending their hay over to Ireland, and we were like the men from Del Monte.
"It's hard to believe now we've come through such a wonderful summer where we're harvesting in such perfect conditions. It's such a contrast. Seeing that first load of hay being brought in to Roscommon and seeing farmers queueing up and going away happy – that was the highlight of my entire time in the IFA."
Jimmy Griffin runs a bakery business in Galway. In June a freak underwater attack he suffered became a global news story.
"I'll never forget it, June 9th. It was my first dive in two years and I was attacked by a conger eel. I had extensive reconstructive surgery to save my face. I'm in business, I can't afford to be sick, so I had to put a brave face on it. I went back to work within the week, but I had to operate behind the scenes more. I had a very bad scar, stitches, the wound was infected. Let's just say you wouldn't like to see me coming serving your food. But it was a matter of getting back down to it.
“Our business featured on an RTÉ series a few weeks ago, highlighting the plight of businesses in the recession. Sales per head collapsed two years ago; we ended up in financial difficulty, but we’re working through it.
“I was reinvigorated by it [the attack], believe it or not. It really focused me on the joys of life because I came so close to death. I came out of the water with a whole new perspective. When it was happening, the last thing on my mind was me: all I could worry about was my children and how I’d get back up safely to care for them.
“It looks like I’m going to make a full recovery but I’m suffering from post-traumatic stress. During the day I’m fine because I’m busy, but at night I have recurring nightmares. It’s as if I’m sitting in a cinema looking at a movie. I can see the eel coming and I’m shouting ‘it’s behind you’. That’s just mental healing, I suppose. Hopefully I’ll return to a full night’s sleep. I got about three or four hours [a night] the past 12 weeks.”
Steve Dunford is an author and historian from Castlebar. He dedicated his summer to The Gathering event In Humbert's Footsteps, re-enacting the 1798 invasion of Ireland by French forces.
"It was all-consuming. It was absolutely fantastic. This whole idea started seven years ago when I was in contact with two French guys, and I had just written a book called In Humbert's Footsteps. We stayed in contact, and for this re-enactment, we brought 20 guys form France, 20 guys from England, and Irish guys playing Redcoats.
“I wondered in the middle of it how Napoleon moved armies without email. We had 5,000 spectators in Killala and 15,000 in Castlebar. We had boats, the Irish Navy, cannon guns, muskets, swords, and massive craic around it.
“It was a huge international thing and a huge cross-border thing. It took the whole summer up. You can imagine organising the navy and helicopters, and permits bringing weapons in to the country, and feeding the guys and putting them up. They did it for nothing so you just look after them and they bring their uniforms and their expertise.
“It has reawakened a lot of people’s interest in their own history. We’re not glorifying anything, but it has given a new impetus to view it in a different light. Gen Humbert is the only victorious Napoleonic general whose name is not on the Arc de Triomphe, and the only one not to receive the Légion d’honneur. But we’re going to work on that now.
“We’ve got 1,798 trees from Coillte, and we’re going to replant them in little groves in all the places that have associations with 1798 here, in the North, in France and possibly in England, so there’s an environmental legacy to this as well.”
Met Éireann meteorologist Gerald Fleming was kept busy with one of the hottest July months in recent years.
"We had no specific indication the summer was going to turn out as it did. When you look at it as a whole, it wasn't spectacularly good, but it was placed in the context of the abysmal summers before it.
“One of the things we looked at in July is what we would define as a heatwave. Now, you can define a heatwave whatever way you want. What’s a heatwave in Spain, isn’t one in Ireland. If you look at five days consecutively with a maximum temperature over 25, then 10 of our stations would have reported heatwaves for five, six, seven days in July. We certainly haven’t had anything like that since 1995, and 2006 was also a pretty good year.
“Once the weather makes the news, when you see it at the front part of the bulletin as well as the end, be that a storm, flooding or high temperatures, our workload increases. We’re primarily dealing with print media, local radio looking for short pieces, national radio stations, television as well – they all want something to fill out news stories.
“Then we have specific clients who would have temperature-related warnings – the railways; if you get a very hot day the rails can distort – and summertime is when local authorities try to get surfacing done, but you can’t lay certain surfaces in low temperatures.
"When the weather is very hot and you're doing the forecast on a Tuesday, you have to give attention to the weekend because people will be planning to go to the beach or have a barbecue. And health warnings as well: sunburn, UV warnings, pollen warnings, heat stroke, you'd have to focus on those risks."
Peter Kelly is a full-back on the Dublin hurling team, who defied the odds to beat Kilkenny on July 1st this summer.
"We had come through two tough games against Wexford two weeks previously. There was a lot of talk about the overall plan: to beat Wexford on the first day and have the week off. That didn't go to plan. We had to deal with it, and ended up playing three weeks in a row.
“We were being written off. They were saying we were tired, that the Kilkenny team were going to do what they do, but we focused on ourselves. We were unlucky the first day [Dublin drew with Kilkenny initially], and then people were expecting Kilkenny to do that usual thing, you know, ‘you don’t get a second chance with Kilkenny’. All we could do was focus on ourselves. We answered the critics, but more importantly, we answered ourselves.
“I remember I was so focused that my girlfriend went to give me a hug after the match and I just brushed past her. It was caught on TV, so I looked like a right weirdo. I looked around, and all the Dublin players were in the same frame of mind. The crowd was streaming on to the pitch, but we knew we had Galway the following week.
“Summer for a GAA person is very different than for a normal person. Your friends and family are going to festivals, and on holidays and to concerts, and you’re just staying out of the sun, constantly keeping in the right physical shape, training, games. It’s a happy sacrifice to make when you have a summer like we did. We conquered a few of our past demons this summer. Down in O’Moore Park after beating Kilkenny the second day – in the dressing room we could hear all the fans on the pitch still singing.
“Ultimately, seeing Johnny [McCaffrey, the captain] lift the O’Keeffe Cup – I mean, we played in lots of epic games, but playing in one that has silver at the end of it is a great relief.”
Declan Geoghegan, the manager of the Irish Coast Guard, was a the helm of the organisation during a remarkably busy summer marred by several drownings.
"The workload was up about 70 per cent, especially during the good weather, when we had unfortunate incidents of people drowning. It spurred us on to do more water-safety ads and raise awareness. The figures are way up in terms of inland, lakes, rivers, mountain rescue, and then you have all the off-shore stuff.
“The numbers of leisure craft, jet skis, sailing, dinghies, all of that was mad. The better the weather is, the higher the number that are out in the water, the greater [the number] who get into some sort of difficulty. This year it was very much related to weather, because we noticed a spike, unfortunately, in loss of life, whereas during other summers people weren’t out using the inland waterways.
“A lot of people were using waterways – quarries or lakes – that they wouldn’t have usually or wouldn’t have been familiar with. People were getting into difficulty, getting cramps, staying in the water too long, not properly trained, or not taking the proper equipment with them.
“There was a learning curve for us in terms of water-safety awareness, and the Minister provided money for TV campaigns, which we ran for the first time ever. We’ll be going around schools, community centres, sailing clubs, anywhere to do with water next year to make sure people are prepared.
“It was extremely busy for us; staff, helicopters, craft, mountain rescue, we just have to tool up for that next summer. Just like road safety, the educational thing is huge.”
It was a summer of what felt like non-stop concerts. Brian Spollen is a concert promoter with MCD.
"The summer is my busiest time of year. It passed by in a blur of shows. From Rihanna on June 21st until today. Non-stop. It was good, successful. It's great to do outdoor events with great weather, because that's been a bit tricky for the last few years. Particularly the shows at Phoenix Park and Longitude, it felt like you were in a foreign country. It's funny, you spend six months setting things up, three months doing it, and then it's gone.
"The big things were launching Longitude, rebranding Oxegen, Vital going for three days. It was a tough summer in the sense that it kept rolling on – there was always the next show.
“Sales were up and it was a pleasure to deal with good weather. You’re telling customers to bring suncream instead of, ‘you’re not allowed bring umbrellas, wear wellies’. Seeing people sitting down and having a drink was great. A lot of the acts I deal with would be working or living on Ibiza for the summer. They tend to get off the plane in Ireland and go ‘it’s freezing’. I remember [David] Guetta last year in Marlay Park pulling out his leather jacket because he was frozen on what was a nice summer day for us. But everyone commented on it this summer – ‘wow, it’s normally raining when we get here’.
“I think the launch of Longitude was very special: the weather, the acts, the way Festival Republic set up the site. Oxegen was a lot of fun as well, I loved the way it went off, no trouble, and everyone had a good time. I was a bit jealous Longitude got the weather, but it’s always going to rain at Oxegen. We said that in May. But here’s to next summer.”
